
Apple to Cease Development of Aperture and Transition Users to Photos for OS X - apress
http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/27/apple-to-cease-development-of-aperture-and-transition-users-to-photos-for-os-x/
======
ghshephard
As a multiple-times-a-day Aperture user for the last several years - I'm
_really_ glad to hear this. Apple has made it abundantly clear, that they were
longer going to invest any effort into Aperture, and so we're going to get the
best of all worlds. The application is absolutely rock solid for me - most of
the database crashes, and corruptions have stopped occurring for over a year -
so in the interim, I have a product that works for me and will keep me
satisfied for the next couple years.

Meanwhile, Apple is going to put all their energy into a single photo system,
instead of trying to do some schizophrenic split between iPhoto/Aperture - I
expect to see a pretty excellent system out of it.

Perhaps it's because I don't work commercial or event photography, but the
reality is that most of what I use Aperture for these days could probably be
done with a slightly beefier iPhoto - which is pretty much what Photos is
going to become.

Photostream, as of about 3-4 months ago, has also gotten reliable enough that
I _never_ have to worry about any picture that I've taken being on my Laptop.
Unlike the early days (months, year?) when it was pretty much a crapshoot as
to whether your pictures would move from your iPhone to PhotoStream and then
to your laptop - It Just Works now.

So, good news all around.

~~~
caycep
The one worry, and this is more of an ancillary one, is that now without the
Aperture competition, Adobe will let lightroom development slack off.
Lightroom is (was) one of the adobe apps that don't totally suck, and I always
credited this w/ them getting taken off guard by Aperture (competitions is a
great thing, etc etc). That being said, I suppose the writing is on the wall
and whatever changes in direction were in store for lightroom is probably
already in motion.

~~~
mortenjorck
I'm not even so worried about Adobe letting Lightroom languish as I am about
them using their newfound monopoly position to at last move Lightroom into the
mandatory Creative Cloud subscription model that ate the Creative Suite last
year. As an enthusiast photographer and avid Lightroom user, there's no way
I'm paying a recurring subscription for the same app when I'm not using it to
make an income.

That said, there's a potential twist here. Apple's upcoming Photos app can go
one of two directions: Apple could, as everyone seems to be assuming, go the
consumer-focused route and stay out of Lightroom's market. On the other hand,
Photos could pack all of Aperture's pro features and more behind an "advanced
mode" UI. Suddenly, Lightroom isn't just competing with an Apple product,
they're competing with _free_.

~~~
iSnow
Apple never does simple/advanced mode UIs

~~~
Bud
Also, compare clicking on various Menu Bar items (or other UI features) with
option-clicking on the same item. Apple has advanced little mini UIs all over
the place.

Similarly, look at many current System Preferences panels in Mac OS X. The
basic stuff most users need is up front, and the rest is hidden behind an
"Advanced..." button.

I conclude that having an advanced mode, or various enhanced features accessed
in different ways from the standard UI, is not inimical to Apple's approach or
UI philosophy.

------
netcraft
Years ago we had the choice of Aperture or Lightroom - we have been happy with
that decision so far and this just confirms it. But lightroom still leaves a
lot to be desired from a photo management perspective - and I wish there were
more alternatives. I'm afraid that the one main competitor going away will
cause improvements to languish in lightroom. Even though we didn't use
Aperture, I will be sorry to see it go.

~~~
saidajigumi
On the other hand, I will give credit to Adobe: since the transition to
Creative Cloud and the new incremental release model I've felt that they've
been _much_ more responsive to actual customer needs. From an outsider's
perspective, getting to this point seems to have been a cultural shift that
took a lot of work to get to -- and they've been getting a ton of positive
response to it.

So I'm hopeful that Lightroom and the rest of the CC apps will continue to
improve considerably because of culture rather than purely the goad of
competition.

~~~
netcraft
I'm not sure I agree with you - they released Lightroom 5 around the same time
as the CC transition, and as far as I can tell they haven't updated it since
beyond support for new cameras and bug fixes, which I would have expected for
lightroom 5 anyway. The last major update I can find is over a year ago now.
They have released Lightroom Mobile but thats all I am aware of.

I hope you are right though and that they do improve based on culture - but if
lightroom is the only major option for a digital darkroom and photo
management, and most of their customers are paying monthly anyway, I don't see
them pushing new innovations.

~~~
calinet6
I think Lightroom was already a bit of a cultural separation from Creative
Suite. It's more like Creative Cloud is playing catchup with Lightroom's
model, which was already fairly modern and nice.

I don't think the monthly model discourages innovation -- as a product person,
more people using the new product is more motivating for the organization, not
less.

~~~
coldtea
> _I don 't think the monthly model discourages innovation -- as a product
> person, more people using the new product is more motivating for the
> organization, not less._

Well, "more people/more motivation" wasn't exactly the case with Quark. Or
with lots of enterprise software companies having their customers by the
balls.

~~~
1stop
Quark wasn't subscription and it fell down the "Who cares about OS X anyway"
hole. Adobe saw that, and smashed indesign onto the market.

~~~
coldtea
I'm not strickly talking about subscription vs no subscription.

I think the key distinction, which is common in Quark of old and Adobe's
subscription model, is "having the customers by the balls".

And the problem I'm reffering to with Quark was not the "Who cares about OS X
anyway". It was about arrogant and complacent company, not caring about its
customers in general, even in the platforms it did support.

~~~
1stop
Adobe have picked up the pace massively since CC.

I'd call it the opposite of complacency. I work heavily in most of their
products (the entire Adobe suite), and the amount of features they are
releasing and the speed at which they are doing it, is amazing given their
size.

If you focus on one product (like lightroom, which is a minor product at best)
then sure, it doesn't look like much, but take a look at Edge, InDesign,
Flash, etc, and there is a lot of improvements taking place.

How are they not caring?

~~~
coldtea
> _Adobe have picked up the pace massively since CC._

Yes, but it's also the opening stage of this. They would risk a backlash if
they started their CC-only period as complacent. After all CS6 still works
atm.

A few years down the road though?

After all Quark was also innovating and caring at first.

~~~
calinet6
I'm not seeing it. What I do see is an organizational change. I can't agree
with the argument for the gloom and doom.

------
potatolicious
I really wish the Pixelmator guys will do a product in this category. They've
already got the core engine, and they have a perfect 100% intersection with
the Aperture userbase (Mac-only).

I for one would like to see a OSX-only photo editing suite. If it's anything
like Pixelmator (no UI/UX compromises for the sake of cross-platform, insanely
fast hardware-accelerated-everything) it'd be a real treat.

~~~
georgemcbay
The amount of work required for software of this type that can reasonably
compete with Lightroom is really massive.

Beyond the obvious editing features you've got colorspace handling issues that
most image editors don't bother with (Pixelmator actually handles this fairly
well already), the need for a very robust plugin system, non-destructive
editing, cataloging features (including image stacks), and a huge amount of
largely unnoticed work that goes into simply keeping up with RAW formats for
new cameras as well as profiles (for automatic CA/distortion fixing) for new
camera/lens combinations.

~~~
Osmium
> a huge amount of largely unnoticed work that goes into simply keeping up
> with RAW formats for new cameras

Could this be largely mitigated by only working with DNG files and letting
Adobe handle the conversion? Their RAW->DNG converter is free after all.

~~~
jasomill
Raw DNG is no more a standard for sensor data than MKV is a standard for video
encoding.

In other words, raw (as opposed to linear) DNG is basically a container format
for sensor data and related metadata. So even assuming Adobe's DNG converter
perfectly supports your camera, you still need code to handle its underlying
sensor data format (your Bayer demosaicing code won't be much help in
processing data from, _e.g.,_ a Foveon sensor) and whatever mandatory image
correction it requires ( _e.g.,_ many cameras and lenses rely on software
correction driven by camera- or lens-supplied metadata, and will yield
_heavily_ distorted images if this correction is skipped).

In other words, until camera development stagnates, raw processing is a moving
target by its very nature.

With that said, AFAIK, Aperture uses public OS X APIs for raw support, so
potential Aperture replacements on OS X can get up-to-date raw support "for
free". Given that Photos will support camera raw, this announcement gives me
no reason to believe Apple won't continue to add support for new cameras in
future OS X updates. Which is not to say Apple will support as many cameras as
Adobe, of course — I'm pretty sure they already don't — or that support for
new high-end (think $20K+ medium-format, not Nikon DSLR) camera support will
decline now that no first-party professional software requires it.

~~~
georgemcbay
Yup, all true.

I think (generally speaking, for most people) that Linear DNG using the Adobe
DNG conversion method asked about is probably sufficient, if inconvenient.
Most people I know who shoot RAW do it for the high-bit-precision dynamic
range and white balance adjustment capability, both of which Linear DNG
preserves.

But there are very valid reasons not to want to settle for partial-baked DNGs.
Personally I was converting my CR2s to DNGs at Lightroom import for a couple
of years (since DNGs compress and take up much less disk space) but regretted
that when Canon's DPP DLO got really useful and I was unable to easily get
those DNGs back into DPP as RAW.

Now I'm a big fan of saving the actual camera RAW file as the 'digital
negative' even if that means the files are bigger and the format is more
likely to be 'obsolete' in the future (there will always be older versions of
Adobe DNG converter and dcraw to use if that is ever a real issue for me).

------
kingnight
I have to imagine they'll do three things:

\- Feature/Adjustments parity with Aperture

\- Migration of 100% edits/metadata from Aperture/iPhoto

\- Photos Extensions on Mac

The third will be really exciting. It's already going to be awesome to have
VSCOcam connected to the Photos library without having to create duplicate
images; this on Mac will be terrific as well.

I am looking forward to moving off Lightroom! Seems very far out for Apple
though.

~~~
ploxiln
just like Final Cut Pro X, right?

(can't tell if you're sarcastic, thought maybe not)

~~~
kingnight
I wasn't being sarcastic, but with FCP's history I can see the skepticism.

I do think/hope it will be different. I feel like there are more signs
pointing to "Photos" app as being superior to Aperture/iPhoto (which, yes, are
totally the same thing really now) and Lightroom.

------
danso
Someone help an Adobe-acolyte out: about how far behind/apart was Aperture
from either Photoshop or Lightroom in feature set? My impression (from reading
Wikipedia and past announcements) was that it was closer to Lightroom in
intended use?

I've recently seen a few articles about startups/business ideas in the
mobile/consumer photo space pointing at the problem of users not having enough
storage space for photos. I _guess_? My perception and personal experience has
been that users don't have enough _ability_ to sort/filter the photos they
already take. Digital/phone photography has allowed users to be voracious
photographers...without a corresponding increase in being able to handle the
information overload...it's already hard enough to pick the best photo among 5
- 10 takes, but a cognitive-chore to search through a flat-folder collection
of thousands of photos with nothing more than a vague recollection of the
photo's date...a wedding photographer once told me that by far, the best
marketing tool he has is to produce a physical album of 50-100 photos, rather
than just a PhotoDVD of thousands of photos. Theoretically, that DVD can be
reproduced and sent around, and many more photos included for the client's
enjoyment...but realistically, clients (and their relatives) don't find
browsing through photo volumes on their OS default viewer to be engaging.
Brevity in editing is important, but also, visitors to a client's living room
can directly see and touch the physical photo album (and see who produced it),
and that in itself is an effective marketing tool.

I guess this is a long way of saying that whatever the state of Aperture was,
I hope Apple makes some innovations in photo sorting/filtering, rather than
just trying to provide tools to beautify photos. I'd argue that Instagram's
killer feature is how it _limits_ the user's ability to hoard photos...once
you take a photo, you are pushed into publishing it...the photo filter is a
way to make you feel less self-conscious about it. After taking 100 photos
with Instagram, you have 100 photos to show off in a nice web album. If you
take 100 photos with just your standard phone camera app, you have 100 photos
waiting to be uploaded/downloaded to iCloud into a standard file system.

~~~
ghaff
>My perception and personal experience has been that users don't have enough
ability to sort/filter the photos they already take. Digital/phone photography
has allowed users to be voracious photographers...without a corresponding
increase in being able to handle the information overload...

I think that's fair. Presumably facial and other pattern recognition, together
with the increasing prevalence of geo-encoding, will improve this to a certain
degree. But I know that I'm not nearly as good as I wish I were at entering
metadata into Lightroom today--and I'm probably better than most.

The one saving grace is that I do publish a subset of photos to Flickr through
the jfriedl Flickr plug-in which has, as sort of a side effect, the
characteristic of creating a sort of album of my better photos.

------
lutorm
Do pros really want to store their photos "in the cloud"? I'm just an amateur
and have ~500GB of photos. Uploading that much is almost impossible over a
normal asymmetric home internet connection, and I imagine professional
photographers must have multi-terabytes of data easily.

~~~
pling
Not a chance. Takes too long to upload and download and the 'cloud' data usage
and rights assignment stuff is pretty unclear. My father (a pro) has about
3TiB on a NAS and AIT backup.

~~~
nimish
Offsite backups are critical. What happens when wherever you're storing those
nas drives / tapes gets flooded or destroyed?

~~~
pling
Tapes are manually archived off site in a safe deposit box monthly. A month
window is an acceptable loss.

Agree entirely. T'was an idiot company I worked for at the time that stored
their backups in the basement of the World Trade Centre. Yes that worked out
well...

------
robbyking
I had to read this headline 3 or 4 times before I realized Transition wasn't
an additional product being phased out.

~~~
DINKDINK
Apple to Cease Development of Aperture, Transition Users to Photos for OS X

------
nicholassmith
Makes sense really, I know people who do use Aperture but they're out numbered
by Lightroom users by a fair margin. It'll be nice to see more advanced
features being provide in Photos as well, to fit the gap between the advanced
(Lightroom/Photoshop user) and the keen amateurs.

------
whence
Man, this just sucks. iPhoto (okay, they're killing that too, but "Photos"
will be similar if not more limited) is weak, and Lightroom feels like a bad
Java app. Aperture was fantastic, a true Mac app.

------
innonate
It's clear they are putting everything into Photos and so this makes sense.
Big question is what they do with all the edits/metadata/etc that people have
invested in Aperture.

~~~
pat2man
Aperture and iPhone seem to share a lot of data even if that data is not
accessible from iPhoto. I would assume everything would still be available in
Photos even if the UI isn't as advances.

------
lips
Sometimes I feel as though I'm in a minuscule minority, as an avowed Mac user
who gives a wide berth to any of their software. From the saga of FCP/X, to
mail.app changing archive formats, to the auto-save/save-as clusterquack -
I've long preferred finding niche vendors for my niche needs. I chose
Lightroom at version 1 for exactly this reason.

~~~
nickm12
+1 In the modern Apple era their applications, particularly the consumer or
pro-sumer oriented ones, have tended to (1) not live up to their demos (2) and
get constantly redesigned and yanked around. What made using a Mac a joy was
the culture of quality espoused by third-party software vendors.

------
hcarvalhoalves
Unifying the integration with iCloud is okay, but that's really unfortunate.
Apple kills a "pro" app while the "basic" apps lose features every new
release.

If you compare iMovie and iPhoto '09 to the latest ones it's a downgrade from
every angle. Even GarageBand lost features, you could use plugins before.

I'm afraid they will "transition" users to Photos in the sense they will let
you import your Aperture library, and that's it. The app will have 50% of the
editing features, because that's what happens everytime a company promises a
new version written from the ground-up.

~~~
Karunamon
Look at what happened with FCP, though. They released a new version, missing
lots of features, and then future releases restored functionality.

When you're doing a ground-up rewrite, it makes sense to get the basics
working first.

~~~
abruzzi
However they radically changed the way the workflow works in ways that some
(many?) users cant adapt to. I don't do much any more since I shuttered my
production side business, but I can't use the current FCP. It's still (and
will always be) missing some do-or-die features for me. The Apple Pro App that
I really use though is Logic, and, please Apple--do not "improve" it.

~~~
modfodder
What do-or-die features are missing for you?

~~~
abruzzi
For me, batch log and capture from tape. FCPX no longer has any tape support.

------
matwood
I used Aperture for a long time, and last year moved to Lightroom. Aperture
has been effectively dead for awhile and this news is just confirmation.

~~~
jakejake
I'm a fairly happy aperture user but have been thinking about moving for a
while since practically everybody uses Lightroom. How did you find the
transition?

~~~
matwood
Not too bad. I spent a weekend figuring out the different workflow and then
some time learning the LR adjustments. The part that took the most time was
unlearning/relearning the different hot keys for basic operations.

------
jmduke
A weird thing to think about: Instagram is, by most metrics, the world's most
successful photo editing software.

~~~
untog
Not really that weird. Fast food is, by most metrics, far more popular than
Michelin star restaurants. Doesn't mean it replaces them.

~~~
jrockway
McDonalds is probably making more money for its shareholders than The French
Laundry, however.

~~~
abruzzi
And when I'm looking for a nice dinner, I'm definitely considering the value
the restaurant provide to its shareholders in my decision.

~~~
jrockway
I'm just talking about the incentives as to which type of restaurant to open,
or more generally, which set of tastes to cater to. Do labors of love scale?
No. Does it make sense to start a business that doesn't scale? I have no idea.

------
pdabbadabba
It seems to have been confirmed (as Techcrunch reasonably speculated) that
development will cease on iPhoto as well.
[http://www.loopinsight.com/2014/06/27/apple-stops-
developmen...](http://www.loopinsight.com/2014/06/27/apple-stops-development-
of-aperture/)

~~~
al2o3cr
The Photos app looks like they are rebranding iPhoto, not "ceasing" anything.

~~~
GrantS
This seems logical, especially in light of the Aperture news, but I'm not so
sure -- all references to the new Photos app, including the demo at WWDC,
refer to it as a viewer for your iCloud-stored photos. It's possible that
instead of cloud storage being an option added to iPhoto, it is being re-
designed as the primary use case, with your Mac as just another iPad-like
device that may occasionally cache some local copies of photos as needed. I
understand that from a practical point of view in 2014, but I think I'm
philosophically against it.

------
vondur
I think most people kind of knew that Aperture was not going to be updated,
it's been on life support for a while now. I prefer the editing tools of
Lightroom, but I prefer the Aperture way of organizing photos. Oh well, can't
have everything I suppose.

------
0x0
I really hope thet will allow for (optional) manual control of where jpeg
files are stored regarding the file system. The opaque "photo library" thing
was really inflexible especially as the size eventually outgrows the internal
SSD drives.

~~~
jakejake
Aperture has a pretty nice method where you can save photos in the library or
in a separate location. You can also have multiple libraries (which are
basically just packages and you can go in and access the jpg and raw files as
well)

I'm kinda bummed, I have been a pretty happy Aperture user for a while even
though I know most people use Lightroom. Not exactly sure what I'm going to do
now.

~~~
0x0
I tried it once and it was pretty horrible, the folder structure on disk
didn't stay in sync with the aperture library. Moving or renaming photos or
folders in one stop didn't update the other spot, so when you thought you had
organized stuff physically, only the aperture library links updated or vice
versa.

------
djloche
This is unfortunate. I hope someone is working on a competitive software
offering.

~~~
dublinben
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned DarkTable yet. I guess more HNers just
use the default Apple programs than I thought. I didn't realize anyone would
even miss Aperture.

~~~
jdboyd
I didn't know that they had finally gotten an OSX native (meaning not
requiring X11) version out.

Now I will try Darktable on OSX.

------
lvillani
I wonder how I would have felt had I bought Aperture a couple of weeks ago.
Sure, 69€ isn't much, but knowing that those were basically thrown away would
have been bad nonetheless.

Thankfully, I resisted the urge.

------
alphapapa
People who are about to have the rug pulled out from under them might want to
check out Digikam. Version 4 was released in May.

------
a2tech
Apple needs to allow iPhoto (Photo.app now) to import Aperture libraries
then-I have a huge collection of photos in an Aperture library (I no longer
have access to Aperture so I can't export the library).

~~~
lh7777
My understanding is that iPhoto and Aperture now share the same library format
in the latest versions, so you should be able to open your Aperture library in
iPhoto right now.

------
s800
Alternatives:

Capture One Pro Various ACDSee apps DxO Paint Shop Pro

------
plg
I guess I'm installing Lightroom now

------
psychometry
I don't use Aperture, but I think it's really unfortunate that the standard
practice for companies like Apple is to simply drop a product entirely rather
than open-sourcing it.

~~~
ghshephard
I do use Aperture every day, and I'm happy Apple isn't open sourcing it. I
want all energy/attention/testing/use to go against their next platform, and
not be fractured.

~~~
psychometry
And what if their next platform is insufficient for your needs? Then perhaps
you'll wish you still had Aperture as an option, but it'll be an obsolete
application with no chance of revival.

~~~
alphapapa
Why are people downvoting your comments? Is there a pro-Apple, anti-FOSS
element here?

The more time I spend on web sites with voting, the more I think upvoting
should be the only option.

~~~
psychometry
Honestly, I have no idea. Once you've spent a bit of time on HN, you realize
it's no better than reddit when it comes to voting.

