Aperture/Lightroom2/Expression Media

I have spent the better part of the week working with photo cataloging programs.

I have used iViewMedia Pro for years; which now, unfortunately, belongs to Microsoft. MS has renamed the program, calling it Expression Media. There have been two "updates" since MS bought it. The first one added the MS splash screen and the new name and little else that I could tell. The second one added some bugs and a menu link to the MS version of Google Earth. That is when I decided I had better start looking for cataloging alternatives.

Apple's Aperture was my first choice because it was cheaper than its rival, Adobe's Lightroom, and because Apple makes great software. After giving it several trials over a period of time, I decided that I was never going to feel comfortable with it. The cataloging functions were just too different from Expression Media. I did love the photo enhancement tools Aperture provided, however.

My need for a new program climaxed, finally, after hard week working with Expression Media. I became painfully aware of its shortcomings and the time it was costing me to side step them. I turned to Lightroom 2 for a closer look. Adobe provides some GREAT tutorials that not only reduces the learning curve but helped me feel comfortable with it.

I decided to switchover to it. Any switch of this magniture takes some doing. I won't go into details now but suffice it to say that I have 30,000 digital photos in my catalog and one of the tasks I gave myself in the change over was to clean up the organization of them and take a fresh look at my keywording. I still haven't completed the job, but I can use Lightroom in the meantime.

I'll describe some of my problems later.

Incidentally, I am selling my copy of Aperture. It is registered with Apple. If you are interested I am selling it for $125. It normally sells for $199. I will send you a PayPal invoice and notify Apple of the registration transfer.

New Site

I have been working for days on this new layout for my website that makes it easier to find my galleries and other information.

Creating the galleries is a lot of work. I have to go through the selections and add prices, titles, and descriptions. I use Microsoft's iViewmedia Pro to do all my cataloging. In that programan I can select a group of photos and set prices and print sizes. The titles and descriptions have to be done individually. The program also has templates for creating thumbnail indexes and photo pages. I created my own template that works with iview.

The major headache was incorporating a blog that had the same look and feel of the rest of my website. I even made a stab at modifying a WordPress Blog template and using it for my whole site but I soon discovered I couldn't use the iview templates, or at least it was going to take much more time and programming skill than I have.

So I went back to Softpress' Freeway Pro, my old standby for creating websites. Although it can be exasperating to use sometimes, I have learned to live with its foibles. It also now has an Action plugin that is supposed to make creating blogs easy. They even have a short how-to video for the Action. Unfortunately the narrator is a Brit with a thick accent that is difficult to understand. Secondly, it is keyed to Google Blogger.

That is where my problems got serious. The match between Blogger and the iView Action Plugin is not all that it could be and Blogger is buggy and a little too simple. I wanted to incorporate Google's Adsense, for instance, which turned into a mess so I have given up that idea for the present.

Let me know what you think of the site and make suggestions.