If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t posted much over the past two weeks, it’s because I aren’t really been using Aperture. Since upgrading to Lion it’s been a tad unstable. Luckily photography and Aperture isn’t my day job, otherwise I would have rolled back to Snow Leopard, but as it stands I wouldn’t recommend upgrading to Lion if you depend on using Aperture for your livelihood.
The funny thing is, almost all my other software runs fine without a hitch. I’ve beed working on a pretty big 3d animation project for the last month using a variety of software, all in Lion and all without any problems. It only seems to be Aperture that is pretty flakey. Fullscreen mode is practically unusable (in my opinion). Of course, as is typical of these types of situations different people’s mileage will vary depending on your system configuration, so if it’s running fine for you then that’s great. All I can do is report my findings with it. It’s disappointing but not that surprising. Aperture’s never seemed high on Apple’s priority list, and pro apps in general seem to be taking a back seat lately, but still, lets hope there is a fix out soon.
Now that it’s been a couple of weeks, I’d love to hear how other people are finding it.
Running lion right now actually, and Aperture 3 works like a charm. Did you try rebuilding your library and all that?
yep – even started with a fresh library
The last thing you want to do is format your drive and start over. Reinstall Snow Leopard, then install Lion. Lengthy, time consuming and annoying, but might just do the trick.
You might want to try and find out if any of your plugins are causing incompatibilities. Maybe uninstall Aperture and clear out all the aperture related files with appzapper, then reinstall. That might work.
Due to instability problems, I now run Aperture in 32-bit mode. Rock solid ever since, and in addition Aperture’s now using a lot less RAM as well.
Speedwise I’m not noticing much difference either.
Try running in 32 bit. It is much more stable.
Upgraded to Lion within a couple of days when it became available. Have had no trouble with Aperture like you have. I did have a hiccup with my Epson printers. A delete and reinstall fixed that. Neither have I had problems with any plugin. Quicken accounting software is not supported nor will it be. So, I went to a MAC friendly app which is better. You do need to retrain yourself on how Lion works, however, that is nothing new with any operating system change. Bottom line is do not fear upgrading to Lion.
The day Fter it came out, I installed Lion fresh on an old MacBook Pro I use for testing and as a back up. I had no issues with Aperture. Actually, the only application that didn’t work was Blogo (blogging software).
After a few weeks I decided o upgrade my work computer (a year old MacBook Pro) and I’ve had no issues so far. I did do a clean install though, so maybe try that?
Been using aperture since I got Lion on release day with no problems at all.
I don’t like Aperture’s new Fullscreen mode either. It’s not buggy, but the extra time for the useless transition is driving me batty.
@ KimH: +1!! Have as yet not found a way to turn this off unfortunately.
Like some who have already commented, I have not had anything happen with Lion that bothers me too much…except for full screen mode, which I am trying to use but am still frustrated doing simple things like quitting the program while in full screen mode. I did upgrade my MacBook Pro 17 ” Mid 2009 to 8 GB ram from the standard 4GB and am seeing much better results especially when using plug-ins like Topaz Adjust and Silver Efex Pro. In sum, I like Lion and Aperture together, but I still have Lightroom 3 to return to if Apple fails to move Aperture forward with “point-releases” of Lion, such as updates to camera profiles, etc.
You should really listen the advise and switch Aperture to 32-bit mode. It is a mystery to me why it doesn’t run properly in 64-bit, but right click on the Aperture logo in applications and choose info. Then change it to 32-bit. Believe me, I’ve tried everything else – rebuilding the library, clean installs, repairing permissions from disc tools and so on – without luck until I changed to 32-bit!
I recently upgraded to Lion and Aperture’s “Write IPTC Metadata to Master” no longer works for embedding info into JPG files anymore for me.
I have been running Lion since the day of it’s release. I use Aperture as my main workflow tool and use it everyday and have had no issues at all.
I’ve been using Lion since the day it came out, and I’ve noticed that Aperture seems somewhat sluggish on my iMac. I had noticed even in Snow Leopard that sometimes, after several hours of use, Aperture performance would gradually slow down, but in Lion, that seems to happen much more quickly. On top of that, I have also noticed some general instability. My machine is fairly high-spec – 8GB of RAM and an ATI 4860HD 512MB video card. Maybe I’ll give the 32-bit trick a shot.
When we edit photos we are actually creating new files on the system, the edits are saved as masks beside the original image. Now the more we edit files, delete them, put new ones in its place, the harddrive becomes more and more fragmented. So a 3gb movie can end u in 3000 fragments lying around the disk. More the fragments, the longer it takes the harddrive to find all of them. Aperture might be slowing down because of the reshuffling of data osx lion brought with it (leading to fragmentation) So I think idefrag ought to do the trick. my 2 cents.
Thanks everyone for the tips. I’ll try it in 32bit mode to see if that helps.
I tried the 32bit mode and it didn’t help, as soon as i open aperture my macbook pro (1 month old only) becomes really slow and i have to close aperture right after that because the mac becomes completely unusable.
I was getting terrible slowdowns/spinning rainbows (MBP CD 2.66/4GB), and decided to try 32-bit. It was massively better. I can’t say what all the dependencies are, because I didn’t isolate the 32 vs. 64 change carefully enough to know.
But I would suggest anyone having trouble to al least give 32-bit a shot.
I have an unsupported theory that 64-bit may be problematic for people with 4GB or less of RAM. Perhaps Aperture tries to grab more than 4GB and the virtual memory system comes more into play, whereas in 32-bit mode, RAM management might be better focused for limited RAM resources.
My understanding is that these performance issues have been totally solved in Aperture 3.2 and OS X 10.7.2.