s.h.a.

was totally stoked about upgrading yesterday. now i'm kicking myself in the pants for doing it so quickly.

when i came home for lunch yesterday afternoon, i installed Aperture 3, typed in my Upgrade serial, and then allowed Aperture 3 to upgrade my old Aperture 2 library. obviously, this was gonna take awhile, so i left it running whilst i went back to the office. when i returned home, i discovered my MBP had actually frozen. ok, that was weird. i had to do a hard shut down (hold down power button) and then reboot.

everything comes back fine, i reopen A3, and its just processing "files." i let that go for about 15 minutes, come back, and the MBP has just sloooooowed to a crawl. i mean awful. it was like being at a concert: beach balls of death EVERYWHERE. i didn't want to, but i had to force quit A3 to do anything else. so i did that, did a normal Restart, and then reopened A3. still processing, same chain of events. i mean, it was terrible.

so finally, FINALLY, i get down to the last 12 "files" or "items" or whatever, and A3 seems to be really stuck on these last 12. it'll just sit there and churn away whilst eating up all system resources and giving me BBODs whenever i move the cursor around. i've tried repairing the database as outlined in the recently updated Aperture manual (to no real end; didn't fix anything), and my next step, i suppose, is rebuilding the database. i've seen lots of folks on the Apple discussion forums having fairly terrible times with the move, but nothing quite like this. i've a fairly large library (not really giant by any means).

its the most bizarre thing. i want to believe Apple really tested and restested over and over again because they knew Adobe was eating their lunch with the impending Lightroom3 release, but this seems to not be the case.

so in a last desperate attempt, i deleted the newly created A3 library and started over, but this time, i unchecked the little box at the initial import screen that allowed A3 to work its magic database updating, then let it run overnight.

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the joys of a (nearly) three-month old include getting up at 4.30am, allowing me to check on my reattempted library upgrade! hooray!

actually, this time, all went well. apparently the only reason you need to upgrade your library to A3 spec is if you actually plan on going back and editing your older photos with the new A3 tools (like the fancy brushes and such). otherwise, you don't HAVE to upgrade/update your entire library at once. if you come across an old project (or individual image) that you'd like to play with again, you can absolutely "reprocess" that image or project for use with the full set of new A3 tools.

all that said: i don't personally feel this should be case. i feel that it should just work from the get go and i shouldn't have to work around or not process my older images for A3 just because it makes my whole computer unstable. but this is the solution i have for now.

my official suggestion for anyone reading this who is thinking of upgrading to Aperture 3, whether from a prior version of Aperture or from iPhoto, is to wait until the kinks are worked out in the next update. the new tools and features are great (especially the brushes and pseudo-Photoshop actions), but thus far, are not worth the headaches that have come in tow. i can't even really give a review or good feel for the software yet as i'm still working out some odd issues.

or something like that.

Click here to download:

Screen Recording 3.mov (4751 KB)

clever, clever Apple. of course, there's music playing as well, but Quicktime X doesn't capture sound. needless to say, it was a fun song.