Q: Aperture to What?

In a somewhat discouraging sign, the captureone.com web site isn't doing well today. I clicked on 'buy' to see the price of Capture One Pro and I got:

Server Error

Sorry but the server has encountered internal error while doing the last operation.

Correction to my original post. I just learned aperture exporter writes keywords throughout my Aperture Library. Shocking actually. Now I'm terrified about what else it does.

Do you mean that in addition to exporting out of Aperture, it actually modify's the aperture library with more keywords?

Yes, thousands of keywords in my case, one for each album an image is related to, plus various image properties.

I quit the export when I realized what was happening. I don't know what Aperture's keyword limit is but I must have been close. I'm sure Aperture was never tested under that kind of load.

After cleaning up Aperture did a full database scan. As far as I can tell AE didn't create JPEG or TIFFs in Aperture library itself. I checked Console to see what it was doing, it does log there.

Freaked me out. I took my backups offline and turned off Time Machine to make sure they were safe. I have an email out to the dev asking what else, if anything, gets changed.

This really isn't something a backup/export tool should do, and if it does do it then users need informed consent (including advice to only run on a copy of the Library!).

After I recover from my shock I may still run AE, but if I do it will run on a copy of my Aperture Library, not the original. Sure I have lots of redundant backups, but I don't like to rely on backups.

léonie - you do seem to be the expert in this

léonie wrote:

 

You are running the Aperture Trial installer, right?  This will install Aperture 3.1, and that is incompatible. You could then try to install updates from Apple's Support page, but they will only take you to Aperture 3.4.3.

The aperture versions, that require a registration key are no longer supported for updating at all.

All later updates are only available, if you have an App Store version of Aperture installed, not the Apple Store version, that requires a registration key.

 

It was possible to convert  the licence to an AppStore licence, when MacOS X Mavericks was released.  You missed that window of opportunity unfortunately. Now it is too late, because Apple stopped the developement of Aperture and only reinstalling AppStore versions is supported.

Your only chance is to contact the App Store Support and talk them into providing a redeem code for an Aperture 3.6 download, to be able to update. This will not be easy. In some cases the AppStore support helped.

so I am seeking advice and I hope to ask my question in as intelligent a way as possible - to match the intelligence of your advice

CURRENT situation: I am an Aperture 3.6 fan using it on an iMac (mid-2010) running El Cap. I shoot RAW files and have just moved from 16 MP camera to 21 MP camera so will start chewing up space even faster so I plan to move to a dedicated photography machine (used Mac Pro ...) and let the family keep using the iMac.

I want to extend my use of Aperture a few more years until Photos.app catches up or move to another solution like CaptureOne...

I started with Aperture on my iMac in the Aperture 2 days and have been upgrading ever since.

WHEN I do get my used Mac Pro (6 core, lots of RAM Radeon HD 5870, SSD) -- I'm open to your hardware configuration advice too BTW ) can I easily move Aperture 3.6 over? and How? (no need for great detail just approach like - load and upgrade or copy over or use migration assistant [which I think won't work because it wants to move everything?] ...) Do you recommend a certain OS X version to use on this dedicated Aperture machine?

Some great suggestions and information.

And both programs Media Pro and Capture One Pro are no doubt two excellent programs.

But $500 for both the Media Pro ($200) and Capture One Pro ($300) is a bit steep.

There are cheaper alternatives. Of course you get exactly what you willing to pay for and nothing more.

Capture One looks OK but I wasn't blown away by the trial.  It's price continues to rise too, that said, I'm not sure what the actual price is now.  The website keeps giving me a price of 279 Euro whether I select Malaysia as my home country (where I live) or the UK.  One should be different because of VAT issues so the 'buy now' page needs some attention.

I was always put off by the Adobe subscription model but since C1 went up by 50 or 70 odd Euros it looks more attractive. I'm not so much into photography that I really needed C1 at 200 Euro, certainly not at 279.  Maybe if we are lucky Photos will be developed more over the next 1-2 years.  As it stands, the prosumer market is a bit sparse, the options aren't that great, and they are certainly not cheap.

There are so many people floating in this boat.  My friends who have been happily using Aperture since Apple's introduction, are for the moment doing nothing.  I have subscribed to Adobe's LR, PS etc. LR is no substitute for Aperture and I am not so pleased with the on-line system.  I have looked at phase one and have decided to wait it out as long as possible with Aperure.

waiting it out  is what most seem to be happiest with. Lightroom migration process is ****.

For me a funny combination of Photos.app for initial processing and leveraging iCloud photo library with Aperture for storage is working reasonably well:

Gordon's Tech: iCloud Photo Library, Photos.app and my Aperture plan (plus Aperture Exporter)

We just have to see what Photos.app is like in 1-2 years. I may stay on Yosemite, certainly won't go beyond El Capitan.

The entire market for longterm photo storage and retrieval is dying. Not just Apple leaving, MSFT and Google too. There's not enough demand to support a single platform app -- needs to be Windows too. Aperture could never be ported to Windows. Curious sociologic shift.

I think in future all prosumer apps will be software rental...

Waiting things out with Aperture has become a pretty viable option, especially since Google recently has released the NIK Collection of Plugins for free:

https://plus.google.com/+NikCollection/posts/AFGsG2Di7EK

Add to that the very good MacPhun Creative Kit Plugins and you have a pretty powerful DAM and image editing package.

https://macphun.com/de/creativekit

The only problem is the big unknown, if future OS X versions sometime down the road will break Aperture. But if you are pretty sure to stick to your current hardware and OS X version for the near future and don't want to upgrade your camera every year, there's no reason to totally abandon Aperture right now.