> But I trust Apple to exist or migrate better than a dedicated product company
I'm staring at my huge Aperture photo library (with tags, edits, versions and albums). Apple left me hanging. I would not assume anything of a huge company.
For all kinds of reasons, I hate what they did there, abandoning Aperture functionality — there remains zero other software that fills what Aperture did for me. Even though Capture One and Adobe Lightroom Classic can both import from it to a degree:
That said, Aperture could still open an Aperture library using the final versions of Aperture up until Mojave. So from the time Aperture was discontinued, Aperture itself worked through six versions of MacOS, until Catalina.
As of Catalina, Aperture no longer ran native[1], but Photos itself could still open and migrate those libraries (note: I have not tried in Big Sur). While Photos didn’t recognize everything initially, before Aperture became unsupported, Photos did eventually handle tags, non-destructive edits, JPEG+RAW pairs, referenced files, and albums.
Apple eventually got the parity enough I was able to move a quarter million photos over into Photos, and haven’t needed to re-open Aperture in a couple years. While I haven’t needed it, I did test the software linked in [1] below, and it worked great.
From README: ”All Aperture features should be available except for playing videos, exporting slideshows, Photo Stream, and iCloud Photo Sharing. If RAW photos can't be opened, you need to reprocess them.”
I'm staring at my huge Aperture photo library (with tags, edits, versions and albums). Apple left me hanging. I would not assume anything of a huge company.