Though this probably won't surprise many of you, Apple is reportedly discontinuing development of their once-popular photo editing and organization platform, Aperture. Aperture was once considered on a level playing field with Adobe Lightroom, but Adobe's continued development and advancements to the software obviously have affected Apple's software, and today's announcement basically confirms that Apple also believes that Lightroom has since catapulted it beyond Aperture's reach.
Apple isn't outright ending the software insomuch as they are letting it fade away. The software will likely be available to purchase for several more years, but Apple will just not be investing any more money into devloping it.
The Loop is reporting straight from Apple's headquarters the news:
With the introduction of the new Photos app and iCloud Photo Library, enabling you to safely store all of your photos in iCloud and access them from anywhere, there will be no new development of Aperture,” said Apple in a statement provided to The Loop. “When Photos for OS X ships next year, users will be able to migrate their existing Aperture libraries to Photos for OS.
This is a bit foreboding to those who aren't fans of Adobe's new Creative Cloud platform. This is one less competitor in the market, leaving only Capture One as a major combatant in the king-of-the-hill-like game that is the photo editing industry.
Take heart however, though Aperture is being allowed to die, Final Cut and Logic Pro are still very much alive.
Noooooooooooo!! I so love working.. the flow and feel is so much easier to me than lightroom...was so hoping this was not going to happen, kind of saw it coming with no updates in a while...
well, i always preferred aperture to lightroom, but i had a feeling something like that will happen so i switched to adobes photographer abo one month ago..still prefer the aperture workflow..
I used Aperture but never really liked it compared with Lightroom. It is a shame Apple don't want to continue with it for the photographers who do use it though.
Years ago I went from iPhoto to Aperture, and loved Aperture until about four years ago. Something happened to my "library", which was inconvenient, but I had backups. Between Apple OS X and Aperture and associated file permissions, the library got blown away. In my Other Life™, I'm a computer geek so I fixed it and lost nothing. When this happened again about 6 months later, I went to Lr and never looked back. I'm now on Creative Cloud and I couldn't be happier. I did like Aperture, but I think Lr is a better product, even superior.
Shame I new that would happened.
I'm bummed. Just when I had my workflow in a groove, including Nik Collection and VSCO Film 01 presets dialed in. I guess Nikon Capture NX outlives Aperture. Will Fstoppers provide coverage to educate on Lightroom vs. CaptureOne vs. I-don't-know-what?
That's a great idea. We will get proficient at the options and see what we can do.
A thorough review of Aperture alternatives would be awesome! Even a review that excludes Lightroom because that alternative is already written about so much throughout the web, or at the very least keep that part of the review till the end.
Capture One, DxO, ACDSee, Nikon Capture NX-D (Beta)
Adam, as a replacement for Aperture only Lightroom and Capture one seem up to the task. If you aren't shooting tethered Lightroom is the way to go. I think that Capture One has great raw processing so that is something to consider but for overall ease LR has many more resources on the web for learning. For high volume shooting Capture One is the industry standard and something that i use often, when shooting tethered by myself I actually like shooting directly into Adobe Bridge since that is the easiest way for me.
I use LR for my personal travel type of work and to keep a large amount of photos organized.
So for me its a combination of both.
Thanks for the Reply t d,
I've decided not to rush & stick with Aperture for as long as I can, which will still be a few years. What I was leaning towards was a Photo Mechanic & Capture One option. I've tried to use Lightroom a couple of times in the past & just couldn't get into it, however further testing may be required.
As noted earlier it would be interesting to see Fstoppers do a thorough review of what's out there, even combining softwares such as Photo Mechanic & Capture One.
For me Aperture was the all-in-one package in terms for photo organization & processing.
Oh, Yes... ACDSee Pro! Really like that program. It is quick and it just works for me.
But I don't see many other people using it. Hope FStoppers will give it some attention.
I have never heard of this program. Interesting!
"I guess Nikon Capture NX outlives Aperture."
Barely.
If we can thank Aperture for something, it's making Adobe have a knee-jerk reaction and spitting out LightRoom, however much of a mess it was in the beginning. Adobe gets like that every time they feel a threat, such as LightRoom 5 being their knee-jerk reaction to Capture One Pro 7. So thanks Aperture.
I ended my 3 year love/hate (hostly hate) relationship with Aperture about 6 months ago. I loved the interface but not the functionality. My version was buggy, crashed often, and was painfully slow to export large files. Now my Aperture computer and associated drives rest quietly on another desk, still active for reorders, but all current work is in LR. I guess I made the right decision.