Lightroom or Aperture?

Aperture or Lightroom or Both?

I have to say that I’m pretty comfortable with Adobe Lightroom™ which I’ve been using since the early betas; however, I just received a legal copy of Aperture 2™ as a gift from a friend who works for Apple. At first, I wasn’t sure if I would even install it since my internal hard drive is pretty full already. Then I started wondering, what benefits would I gain by using it?

So, after thinking for a few minutes, I loaded it up on my Mac, and Aperture found some images that I had sort of forgotten about. Cool. These are some of my earlier photos that were stored away in iPhoto in an album that is not easy to find using the regular Finder in OS X. I also found that I can integrate Aperture with my Apple TV that I use to show slideshows to my clients instead of trying to build it all in iLife and iTunes. This seems like it would be easier to do although I haven’t tackled it yet.

Lightroom will still be my primary tool and maintain my image library and metadata, but to be honest, Aperture will see some use as well in displaying slideshows. Do any of you use Lightroom or Aperture? Do any of you use both? I’ve decided that Aperture has gained a place on my harddrive and during the slower upcoming months I’m going to try to see how I can integrate it into my regular workflow. Let me know what you think.