It still cooks!

You can read about how to migrate from Aperture to Lightroom here.

Given the great speed and smoothness of Lightroom on my MacBook (1.83gHz Intel Core2Duo, 2gB RAM, Intel GMA950 graphics card, OS 10.4.11) I thought it might be fun to try it on my old iMac (1.25gHz IBM G4 PPC, 1gB of RAM, OS 10.4.11). This is the elegant ‘screen-on-a-stick’ design after which the iMac’s ergonomics went downhill – the poorly thought out stands on the current crop (G5 and later) need a couple of thick books to raise the screen to the right height. We keep that old Mac around in the living room primarily as an email and Internet browser for guests. The screen is superior too – far less color change occurs as you move your head. Needless to add, Aperture will not even run on this machine which uses a GeoForce FX5200 graphics card. Finally, it’s further distinguished by having a proper, horizontal disk drive which not only accepts 3″ discs (put one of those in your MacBook and it’s toast) but also burns DVDs (an option I avoided, to save money, on my MacBook). Unlike the disc slot in my MacBook, which refuses to read discs 50% of the time, this one really works. So much for progress.

Therefore I loaded Lightroom on the old Mac and tried to access my library of pictures by neworking the two. Well, Lightroom reported that it does not support networked volumes, meaning the drive has to be hard wired to the computer running Lightroom. No problem. I plugged the hard drive with the Lightroom database into the old Mac and fired her up. Loading the largest picture in the database – a 100mB TIFF file – was a snap. It takes a few seconds longer than with the MacBook but thereafter the processing controls that so dog Aperture – spot retouching, cropping, horizon levelling – were every bit as smooth as on the MacBook. The dead reliable iMac is some five years old, the MacBook has but a few months (and one repair already) on it.

The wonderful G4 iMac

So anyone running a machine of this vintage and thinking of using Lightroom should be just fine. If your Mac is even older and you are running Lightroom on it, I would be interested in your comments. There are many fine G3 Powerbooks still in daily use out there.

So, finally, a proper break with the incessant, money wasting, perennial hardware upgrade cycle dictated by Apple’s software design. And now I have total redundancy (hardware and data back-up) if my MacBook breaks down again – I wouldn’t be betting against that given my recent experience with Apple’s poor quality control.

Note that both machines are running the last version of OS Tiger (10.4.11). I have not upgraded to OS X Leopard (10.5) as I try never to buy ‘first of breed’, preferring to let others act as Apple’s unpaid guinea pigs. Indeed, there are many comments out there on chat boards that suggest that Adobe (or Apple – much finger pointing here) has work to do to make Lightroom render colors properly with Leopard. Additionally, all this user sees in Leopard is glitz and gloss, with little improvement in the way of function. Just like Aperture 2.0, in fact.

Aperture on a G4 machine? Fugghedaboutit! Neither that graphics card or the G4 CPU are even supported.

For those photographers out there looking to migrate their Lightroom application from Windows to a Mac (a trivial process requiring copying of your picture files and installation of the Mac version that came on your disc), there are some superb, lightly used, bargains to be had out there in G5 iMacs, Powerbooks and MacPros. A great way of fighting back against hardware upgrade tyranny. The LCD screens are reputed to be better than those on many current models (my G4 iMac testifies to that) into the bargain.