On a Powerbook G4, Aperture is pretty slow. I think everyone who cares knows that. But the interesting thing is, it’s slow regardless of whether you’re looking at a big RAW image or a big JPEG image.
For the longest time, I thought I was taking a performance hit because I wanted to shoot in RAW. That, if I switched to shooting JPEG, all my image processing tools would work faster (for loading the files, anyway). It makes some sense — even a high quality JPEG file is about 1/3 the size of the same file in RAW.
So what is Aperture doing that takes so long? is it sending stuff down to the graphics card? Is it seeting up some chain of Core Graphics filters? And why can’t it just store higher resolution thumbnails? It does seem to store some kind of thumbnail for each image, but it’s way too low res for any preview that I do on my 1600×1200 screen.
I’m not convinced that there isn’t another, larger thumbnail size that would offer a better performance-to-storage-used ratio.

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