Just bought CS5.5 - should I move to LR from Aperture

[hotwheels22]

Hi All.

New poster here. Have heard great things about Lightroom and especially the forums. I currently am organizing my images in Aperture from basically no organization on my PC.

Anyway, would anyone mind helping me figure out what the benefits would be (if any) of moving to LR from Aperture - given that I plan to be using a Photoshop < > InDesign workflow? I've noticed that I effectively will have to /export/ images from Aperture to my HD and to then keep these organized in Folders when working in this workflow. Also, same question for uploading to my website (currently I have to export these and then upload to FTP). I suppose I /don't/ have the same question for Flickr since this is seamless in Aperture but I will be moving to a Wordpress Blog/Portfolio from MobileMe here shortly so if there are any benefits on moving to LR for this I'd love to hear them as well.

Apologies for the diffuse nature of the questions as I try and narrow things down.

TIA!

 

[MarathonMax]

No you do not need to. But you could. I did. See the reasons why here on my blog:

http://maximegousse.wordpress.com/2011/07/08/lightroom-3-first-impressions-from-an-aperture-user/

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Hi hotwheels, welcome to the forum!

One of Lightroom's strongest points is the community supporting it. There's loads of help and education available, and a large number of plug-ins which extend Lightroom's functionality. For example, there's a plug-in which uploads your photos to Wordpress http://photographers-toolbox.com/products/lrblog.php There are also excellent plug-ins available for Flickr and FTP.

I would suggest waiting for the final LR4 release, and then considering switching. Lightroom stores all of your photos as accessible folders on your hard drive, so you wouldn't need to manage your InDesign files separately - you could even consider using Publish Services to keep those exported files in sync.

There's lots of flexibility there, so you can adapt it to your workflow, to a large degree. And of course, we're always here to help!