Lightroom, Aperture cautions with Leopard

As Leopard gets out into both the developer and user communities, we’re seeing a few cautionary notes from developers regarding compatibility and performance. Recently, Apple and Adobe issued advisories regarding their respective image management and catalog applications, Aperture and Photoshop Lightroom:

Lightroom compatibility issues

While most of the Adobe apps—with the exception of Acrobat Professional—were initially given the thumbs-up for Leopard compatibility, there are also some issues with Photoshop Lightroom, including problems with the Print module. As Tom Hogarty, Lightroom product manager, notes in the Lightroom blog , most of the issues are relatively minor, and that there will be “an update in mid-November that will address key compatibility issues.”

Hogarty also remarked that they’re also trying to understand the what happens when Lightroom accesses its Catalog file (which contains information regarding the operations you’ve applied to images in your library) while Leopard’s Time Machine is running:

“The interaction between Leopard’s Time Machine and Lightroom’s catalog files is unknown at this time. Running Time Machine backup or restore operations while Lightroom is in use is not recommended until more information can be obtained.”

Aperture and Time Machine

Aperture was updated to Version 1.5.6 last week for Leopard compatibility . It has been working great for me, and I haven’t seen many reports of major problems with it, but an Apple Knowledgebase document posted last week similarly recommends using manual backup and restore settings for Time Machine when you’re using Aperture. Like the Adobe comment, Apple suggests that the interaction between Time Machine and Aperture could be dicey, primarily when Aperture writes to its primary database file:

“If you use Time Machine with Leopard, be sure to set your computer up so that Time Machine only does manual backups. Avoid performing either backups or restores while Aperture is running.”