Photoshelter instead of Aperture or Lightroom?

Photoshelter is an online archive service, so you’re really talking apples/oranges.

I think he meant Photo Mechanic. I am using it but I have never tried the other two. My personal experience says it is fairly good, simple, if that is what you need. I am sure there are better programs, just never had the time/will to try them as for what I do it works just fine.

Alex

I guess I don’t really understand workflow. I was thinking of workflow as organizing, tagging, watermarking, and adding or filling in missing EXIF data, followed by posting for presentation or sale.

David, both Lightroom and Aperture are Digital Asset Management suites (among other things, such as basic editing). They’re pretty much designed to help you organise all your images from import to tagging, basic fix ups and then export. Lightroom and Aperture will export multiple formats, including basic html and web galleries, etc. Photoshelter is an online archiving and marketing service. It does similar things in terms of allowing you to organise files into archives and galleries for public presentation, and allows you to set up e-commerce facilities so you can automate customers/clients purchasing your work. It is, however, online only, so you can’t use it to organise files on your home computer, and it’s only really good once you’ve organised the files you already have into some coherent order and then upload them to the Photoshelter server.

In fact, Aperture has a plug in that allows you to export your pictures in a certain format and upload to Photoshelter in one swing, but this is really only a bell and/or whistle. The guts of all these programs (Photo Mechanic, Fotostation Pro, Lightroom, iView Media Pro, Aperture, etc) is that they help you with image logistics.