Advice on software

[Tony Meredith]

Hi All,

After recently photographing my first wedding and taking in excess of 750 images, I'm seriously thinking it's time to invest in some decent photo management software. The kinds of things I'd like to do are renaming files, tagging files for further processing, resizing and creating slideshows. Integration with photoshop CS would be highly desirable. I was thinking along the lines of Lightroom or Aperture, but i really don't know too much about these or any other options. If anyone has advice or opinions I'd greatly like to hear from you. An important consideration for me is that my G4 Mac (OSX 10.4.9) is getting pretty old now, and I'm not sure if all the latest offerings will run on it.

Tony

[David Kilpatrick]

It may be time to move on from the G4. If anyone here would like a fast twin processor 2.0HGHz G5 with twin screens (20 inch Cinema and 15 inch Mac Studio in the plastic surrounds) and accelerated video card we have one going spare, open to reasonable offers. But it makes sense to move to an Intel Mac to be most compatible with new software.

Your obvious choice would be to upgrade CS to CS3, the last version able to run on the G4 (CS4 will only run on Intel Macs). Bridge CS3 offers all the functions you really need, combined with Photoshop - metadata entry, name changes, rating or tagging, slide shows, saving collections in a new format (i.e. exporting a whole set of selected images for a certain print size). Lightroom does it better but it's really just automating things you can do with Photoshop scripts and features of Bridge.

Aperture is cheaper at £129 versus £199, and processes Sony/Minolta raw files better, but it does not integrate quite as fully with Photoshop. I'm not sure whether it runs on a G4 or not, in the very latest version.

David