Originally posted by Frogfish Maybe someone else has mentioned this but clarification for any potential Aperture users out there : you can choose how your photos are stored, bring them all into Aperture's Library or leave them where they are (I have all of mine stored off-computer in a separate external hard disk - Aperture keeps previews of all of them on our computer so you can view these - but not work on them until you connect the external HD - at any time).
Your Aperture explanation is very clear and helpful.
Lightroom certainly has no access to photobooks that I can find, I would have to export and then import into something else for that. However, with about 14000 photos stored, moving over to Aperture full time would be a trial since the changes I've made, or rather the details of the changes would be lost.
I suspect most people start with trialing several programs, find one & barring it being complete crap stay with it because of the difficulty in moving over. You get used to the routine and the way it works along with it's faults and after awhile, don't really notice it.
That being said, I may use Aperture as well as LR3 for it's faces routines and photobook access.
I already use iPhoto for various simple and small tasks rather than LR3,