Comparing iPhoto 09 and Aperture 2

Question

I am giving a presentation on iPhoto and Aperture. Is anyone aware of a comparison table showing the significant differences? It does not need to be too sophisticated, just the basic differences.
I stopped using a iPhoto a few years ago when I moved to Aperture, in part because of the horrendous filing system at the time. iPhoto 09 is very different from the program I abandoned and has certainly closed the gap - no doubt some of the features will make their way into Aperture 3.0, when that appears. Anyway, I was hoping someone could show me where I could find a basic features comparison which I could use to show participants.
Many thanks,
Graham

Answer 1

Some Differences between Aperture and iPhoto.
iPhoto is firmly focussed on the Domestic market, especially on the Point and Shoot user. Aperture is aimed squarely at the Professional shooting RAW. This pretty much explains the differences.
Aperture has much higher hardware requirements than iPhoto. iPhoto may use more disk space (though with high quality Previews in Aperture there may be little difference). Put it this way: the principle difference in terms of Hardware is that iPhoto will run comfortably on any machine Apple makes.
Aperture has much better fine control over Processing Raws, though it uses the same engine for this as iPhoto. However, iPhoto can process and edit RAWs too. iPhoto can send a RAW file to an external editor, which Aperture cannot. The both support exactly the same RAW formats, and the same file formats.
iPhoto neither reads nor writes all of the IPTC data that Aperture does. But it can write to the Exif (date and time) and it can write to the IPTC (Title, Keywords and Caption) on Export. Aperture is much stronger in this area.
iPhoto has better slideshows, especially in iPhoto 09, with six different styles, much better slideshow exports options too, up to HD quality - actually any Slideshow export is better than Aperture’s
Books are limited by Template in iPhoto, all elements of a book are editable in Aperture. Aperture has no support for printing Calendars and other items.
Aperture has much better support for Referenced Libraries. Running iPhoto in Referenced Mode is tricky, especially when the Originals are stored on a different volume. There is no easy mechanism for re-connecting Originals and therefore migrating to a new volume or even a new machine can be a bear. Aperture is much better for processing and managing large numbers of files. That said, iPhoto is good for 250k images, and we’ve seen reports over on the iPhoto forum of Libraries in excess of 100k. Users report some performance issues.
Both are integrated throughout the OS and in the same ways. They have limited integration with each other.
I smile when folks refer to iPhoto’s “convoluted” filing system. This impression comes from people trying to access the files via the Finder. Have you ever looked inside an Aperture Library?
Regards
TD