Apple introduced Aperture 3, a long-overdue update to their professional photo management and editing tool, today. I’ve been using A3 tonight to process some shots and am rapidly becoming extremely frustrated with it. There’s some big steps backwards work-flow wise, at least for how I’m used to using Aperture:

• Previous to A3, selecting a photo in grid view and hitting F would take you to full-screen mode for that photo. Now it takes you to a full-screen grid.
• You can no longer use the scroll wheel in full-screen mode to navigate between images.
• In A2 there was a Keywords pane at the bottom of the metadata panel (this and this). This panel was awesome; you could apply keywords to multiple images at once, it auto-completed and gave you an easy to read list of the keywords currently assigned to an image. It’s inexpicably gone in A3, along with its EXIF & IPTC cousins, leaving the laugable keywords HUD and whatever it is that pops up when you hit shift-D (Window > Show Keyword Controls).
• The Facebook export sucks donkey balls. I attempted to upload 27 images to Facebook. A3 randomly picked 20 of those images to upload, and there’s no way to add the rest from within Aperture. Dragging the images to the Facebook gallery in the Library panel does nothing. I’m so thankful that Fraser Speirs’ awesome FlickrExport still works (in 32-bit mode); I can’t imagine how bad the built-in Flickr export is.
• The Batch Change dialog no longer lets you choose from Views in the Add Metadata From dropdown; it only lets you pick metadata sets. Additionally, the append mode is retarded; I’m having a hard time articulating it, but essentially because it only lets you see fields from metadata presets instead of views, it pre-populates the fields with information from those presets meaning that you either have to clear out the fields you don’t want to change or uncheck them, lest you end up with mangled metadata. Compare A2 and A3’s batch change dialogs.

A couple of stupid things: I much preferred the smaller fonts, and hate that they used Marker Felt in the Faces interface. The faint flag image that appears when you hover over a thumbnail in grid view is annoying.

It’s not all bad; the speed improvements are noticable on my 24” iMac, and the map view is nice (and thankfully the geolocation info is readable by FlickrExport). The auto-backup on import is great (if not long-overdue) and I’m intrigued by the ability to fire off an AppleScript on import.

I may try blowing away all my prefs and settings and starting with a clean slate when I’ve got some time, but right now I’m torn between the speed improvements and the massive blow to how I’m used to using Aperture.