iPhoto 9.3 and Aperture 3.3

Among the announcements at Apple’s developer conference this morning was a new MacBook Pro containing a “retina” display, with double pixel density just like the screens in the iPhone and the iPad. To support this new display, Apple also shipped updates to both iPhoto and Aperture, bumping them up to version 9.3 and 3.3, respectively. One other feature included with these updates is for iPhoto and Aperture to share the same library. The description of this new feature on the Aperture website says: Now iPhoto and Aperture share a photo library. Which means no matter which app you open, you can view and edit all your photos. When you adjust images using the tools in Aperture, you see the changes in iPhoto. And vice versa. There’s no need to import, export, or reprocess photos from one app to the other — it happens automatically. Faces, Places, Albums, and Smart Albums work across both apps, too. And slideshows created in one app can be played back in the other. This unified library makes it easy to step up from iPhoto to the advanced tools in Aperture. Or use Aperture to make professional edits, then go back to iPhoto to create a calendar or cards. So whether your photos are professional or just for fun, you get the best of both apps. This obviously has implications for users of iPhoto Library Manager. I have not yet had a chance to download and test the new versions of iPhoto and Aperture, so I don’t know exactly what the interaction between them and the current version of iPhoto Library Manager will be like. I will obviously be trying the new versions out as soon as I can and running tests to figure out how this new library sharing works. Update 6/12/2012: I’ve had a chance to test out the current version of iPhoto Library Manager with iPhoto 9.3. You can still use iPLM 3.7.3 to create libraries and switch between them with no problem using iPhoto 9.3. Copying albums/events or merging libraries with iPhoto 9.3 doesn’t work right now, but iPLM will be updated soon to support that. If you try copying something with the current version, you’ll receive an error message, but your libraries won’t be modified at all, so no harm will come from the attempt. You can use any of your iPhoto libraries with Aperture (after having upgraded them to iPhoto 9.3) as well. A single library cannot be open in both iPhoto and Aperture at the same time, but the two programs enforce that themselves, so you don’t have to worry about one of them accidentally stomping on the other one. So, an update to iPLM will be forthcoming to support copying/merging with iPhoto 9.3, by the end of next week at the latest if everything goes as expected. For now, I would only recommend sticking with iPhoto 9.2.x if you still need to use iPLM to copying or merge between libraries, otherwise you should be fine to upgrade to iPhoto 9.3.