iPhoto is a nice piece of 'free' software that comes with your mac, and works generally pretty well for listing all your photos in a smart way, tweaking things like contrast to make them look a bit more like pro photos, etc.

But eventually you realise it's just not enough. If you take photos at all seriously, you will need to tweak them in ways that iPhoto can't cope with.

So, in came the 30-day trial of Apple's Aperture photo editing software. If you've ever heard of photoshop (you must presumably have been living in a dark-room for the last 10 years if not) then it's like that without the layering features, and without the VAST cost (ie we're talking £120 vs photoshop's £500ish slap in the face).

And if all you want to do is modify and touch up the photos you have, rather than build montages and cut images up in cunning ways, Aperture is really all you'll need. It has all the useful tools you'd expect for editing an image: dodge & burn, retouching, lift & stamp, etc.

Where Aperture really comes into its own though is in its photo organization and metadata tools. It's very easy, for example, to set star ratings, create iPhoto style smart albums, group photos together, change metadata, even organize photos according to certain metadata values.

Once you've finished your editing there's even a really nice vault feature built in to Aperture. Just connect an external drive (or for the brave a Time Capsule), press a little button, and all your photos, metadata, etc gets backed up for you. Very simple.

In that regard my feeling is that Aperture is a great tool for editing photos and actually organizing them in meaningful ways so you can access them or print them out, rather than letting them sit hidden away in some crazy filesystem that no one else will ever untangle.