Monday, October 22, 2007

Memory for Memories

I ordered a 2 gigabyte memory upgrade for the G5 from Crucial, so that I can run the 30-day trial of Aperture. I am hoping that Aperture might do what I need as far as organizing these photos, especially when it comes to keeping track of metadata. I think that is part of what it is designed for. My only hesitation is that I want the metadata to be part of the archive. If it is locked in some proprietary format, and in ten years no one has ever heard of Aperture, there goes the metadata.

I've seen a lot of people complaining that Aperture is slow, but I think this may come primarily from two factors:

- When you import pictures, it builds thumbnails using an I/O- and CPU-intensive background task, which can slow down your computer for many hours.

- It is no doubt a very memory-intensive applications, and if it runs out of physical RAM and starts paging, things are going to feel very sluggish, very quickly.

We'll see how it goes in practice!

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