I have an early access license for Aspect right from the start. But never managed to really give it a deeper testdrive. Currently I use the latest not CC Lightroom from a perpetual license. But nowadays most of our family photos and videos are from Apple devices and there is no support of HEIC and only a partial MOV support in the old Lightroom.
And every year for preparing the annual christmas present (creation of a photo calendar) I feel the pain to use it. Therefore I would try to switch to Aspect (latest preview, currently 23) with that for going through and categorizing the images of 2023 and exporting selected ones for our calendar project. Especially annoying is the process of converting HEIC to a supported format or even to concert the MOV files.
Now to my question: is the latest preview probably stable enough to do so? Are there any known issues with HEIC or MOV files generated by Apple or other critical issues?
The core stability has shown to be pretty good since some time now. There are still some known issues related to certain GPUs, which can result in crashes or certain artifacts in the UI. The practical test exposure of the P2P synchronization is also limited so far, so that should only be used alongside a proper backup procedure and should not yet be used as a replacement for one. Personally, I’m managing my photos in Aspect for quite a while now, and it has probably been over two years since I last had any notable issue with one of the betas, apart from an occasional crash.
Having said that, we are still not quite happy with the user experience while initially setting up a library. In particular, the image analysis process, which starts shortly after the library has been created, still affects the overall application performance very notably. On some systems this can get quite annoying and I’d recommend to just let it finish before actually starting to use the application. Our plan is to make a substantial improvement in the upcoming beta, though, which should be out in one or two weeks, so it would make sense to use that as a starting point.
HEIC and MOV support is solid as far as we know. On Windows, HEIF images require installing the HEIF imaging extensions and HEVC video extensions. On macOS, both work out of the box.
Regards and thank you for supporting this huge endeavor,
Sönke