Replacement to Aperture

As an interim to a Plan B I assume that by sticking with OS Yosemite one can run both Aperture and Photos on the same machine?

A new operating system usually does not make earlier software incompatible. Movie HD 06 is a good example, used by millions, five years after it was discontinued.

Although, one could certainly make an operating system "break" older software to force people to "move along".

Most of my clients expect to see a Retina display, either on location, or in the studio, or at a prooofing-presentation.

That would not work in our organization. We are only allowed to purchase laptops with built-in optical drives. So, that leaves us with just one MacBook Pro option that does NOT have the retina display.

Although, one could certainly make an operating system "break" older software to force people to "move along".

iOS 8 did that to iPhoto 2 on iOS. Without any warning in the iOS 8 release notes, iPhoto turned out to be incompatible, without an upgrade available. After upgrading to iOS8 could he surprised iPhoto users migrate the iPhoto Libraries Photos, but it was a lossy transition. The photo books and web journals could not be migrated, and Photos on iOS is still a poor substitute for iPhoto iOS: it does not show the keywords or titles, no brushed adjustments, no Info panel with meta data at all.

I've written elsewhere on this forum that I think Apple are working to a simple and quite obvious plan. Make a suite of "good-enough-for-most-people" software and give it away for free. That software works across the ecosystem. Start a document on your Mac, edit it on your phone. Open it in a web browsers on Windows and keep it all in sync. That's quite a trick when it works. If you're a more demanding user then you need to go to 3rd party makers - so Pages is good for simple documents. Writing a Phd? Get Word or Nisus. Shooting family Jpegs with a point and shoot or a phone, use Photos on the device and your Mac. Edit, organise, tag once and it's all available for everywhere. But if you're a more demanding user? Lightroom. Photoshop, Capture One etc

There are two advantages for Apple: they get a good suite of middle of the road software that's integrated across their ecosystem. That sells hardware. They also get a healthy market for 3rd party developers who they are facilitating and not directly competing with. For the average user, they get great value in their software and a healthy ecosystem in their devices. Apple don't have the expense of a fractured software programme.

For the demanding user? Well you get the same as other ecosystems. You want better than what comes with the machine? Buy it.

It makes sense.

As for Agile, I really wish Apple would actually follow the "close collaboration with users" thing, but lets face it, Apple's engineers do not collaborate with the userbase. There's not a single post from an Apple engineer anywhere on these forums.

You have to be realistic here. This forum has more than a million members. It's designed for users to talk to users. You're told that upfront. It's quite clear. There is no way that Engineering can have a coherent conversation with a million people. Most people on the forum simply would not have the vocabulary to interact meaningfully with developers. Most probably wouldn't want to.

They're extremely insular. They view us as a source of information.

Well you have no idea what conversations they may (or may not) have on other fora - beta testers, developers, focus groups and whatever. They don't really view this forum as a source of information. The signal to noise ratio (like this post) is far too low.

But I don't think they mean to intentionally anger, hurt, and mystify us. It's just caused by lack of communication.

Is there any other large multi-national corporation that does meaningfully converse with its customers?

You have to be realistic here. This forum has more than a million members.

On coherent conversations with software engineers & the forum:

fwiw, Its hard enough to wade through 5 pages of conversation that is on topic!

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Trying to assess which way to go from Aperture is a problem.

I suppose one cannot expect a good comparison between the alternatives on this forum.

Aperture worked rather well, excepting the library overhead - and could drop me to Photoshop.

Asset management, with some robust editing features is the need. The asset manager/editor that came with my cameras was no solution. Lightroom methodology doesn’t appeal to me very much in the versions I tried.

I don’t want another dead-ended piece of software. Did that enough with Apple OS 7, 8, 9, and less with OS X.

I don’t want to spend a long time intricately assessing several application options on my own, but it looks as though I (we) have to.

Well that sounds like a particularly dumb requirement. Why is it mandatory to have an optical drive? When Apple stops selling them, will you have to switch to Dells? Maybe you should have a requirement to ONLY buy systems with VGA ports 😝

don’t want another dead-ended piece of software. Did that enough with Apple OS 7, 8, 9, and less with OS X.

I don’t want to spend a long time intricately assessing several application options on my own, but it looks as though I (we) have to.

None of us do, but I really don't think we have any choice but to assess the alternatives for your own personal situation. I've gone to LR, but I need an app that works for my situation and that's the closest to ideal for me. Thus far I've found the asset management to be different but not much different from a referenced library in Aperture. In truth the processing has got well ahead while Aperture stagnated. But that's my situation. Your needs might be different.

Why is it mandatory to have an optical drive? When Apple stops selling them, will you have to switch to Dells? Maybe you should have a requirement to ONLY buy systems with VGA port

I am involved in the movie industry. The majority of movies are distributed on optical media. Yes, I have seen some people on flights with external DVD drives duct-taped to the bottoms of their MacBooks. Not something I care to do.

When Apple stops selling them, will you have to switch to Dells?

We will probably switch to Toshiba, not a fan of Dell. There was a time in the past when Apple dominated movie editing and screenwriting, this is no longer the case. Switching to Windows is NOT what I want to, but it would not be difficult at this point.

Maybe you should have a requirement to ONLY buy systems with VGA ports

I do enjoy analogies, I'm not understanding that one.

It is such a shame that Apple has completely lost touch with its professional base since Steve passed on.

They had the best product on the market and just walked away from it.

Did they ever think of selling it to some company that actually had an interest in the professional market?

Personally I hate the Lightroom interface. Capture One is more of an option. One other thing that Aperture does really well is to sync a smart album to an iPad. You can just create a keyword for certain images, move it to a Smart Album and then sync and you are off to the customer. I am sure that Photos will do that but probably not much else.

>> Something abut being tied to dying or dead technologies... <<

I didn't think he could be talking about the 700,000,000 DVDs and Blu-rays sold in 2014.

“In any forecast, physical goods will remain the largest piece,” “It’s a very important revenue stream. There is no indication that digital is going to surpass physical. We need to grow the entire pie.”

Bill Clark, Anchor Bay Entertainment.

It is such a shame that Apple has completely lost touch with its professional base since Steve passed on.

Apple's target market is moving rapidly towards younger, less experienced customers. So from a business standpoint I can understand what they're doing.

However, the professional user (a.k.a. power user) has a great deal of influence on what the new user, or young user purchases. I would argue that keeping the professional / Prosumer customers happy makes good business sense.

I have successfully influenced hundreds of people to Macintosh and other Apple products. Most of these people are using iPhoto not Aperture. However, if I was not such a fan of Apple products most of those people would still be stuck in the Windows world. Yes, the professional is a small market share, but we significantly help steer the aircraft carrier which is Apple.

I agree, Aperture is about asset management. I teach and have about 20 photographers who shoot during the year. They have daily assignments and edit on the 12 Mac we have for Photo. They then export the images as a library and I import them into a master computer and redistribute according to category. So all the hockey pictures are one place and all the teaching photos are in one place, etc, etc. We have 10s of thousands of pictures on file, all organized this way. It works very well and the school utilizes the students work for everything - web site, Alumni Magazine - you name it. We made a commitment to this system with Aperture v1. The thought of migrating all of this material, which will eventually have historical value, is mind blowing. We are thinking of buying a new Mac and never upgrading it just so we can keep our files available on Aperture into the future. I would consider doing this (never buying new Macs) for all 25 production Macs in the Media department if I knew the camera companies wouldn't keep changing RAW. I've spent some time looking at Lightroom and am not very impressed. It certainly lacks eloquence. Apple should either have a Pro division or spin Aperture and FCP off like they did Filemaker.

I have spent years building clients libraries around the world based on Aperture...since the start

Apple has simply dumped on me and my clients with a short 'Dear John' letter.

I find this beyond reproach and an appalling betrayal of customer loyalty.

The reasons are obvious as to why Apple has simply turned iPhoto into Photos....its simply what iPhoto should have been ages ago but they let it lag, plus the spreadsheet accountants in the back room have said Aperture doesn't make money .....too small customer base..so drop it.

Steve Jobs..you should be ashamed. You have literally ruined my reputation and left me in the cold.

As to an alternative?

Well I am trialling all of them and apart from the gift Apple has seeded to Adobe (Lightroom & Photoshop cloud bundle) its a no brainer for Capture One Pro 8 and Media publisher if you are serious about your business.

Apple should have on sold Aperture rather than dump it!!! It makes more money than most small companies so it easily could have continued with Aperture if it had a soul and spirit.

DaddieMac wrote:

You're right Terence. That's why it's so infuriating, the more I think about this whole situation. I've stuck by Apple for a long time… a lot of us have. We've defended Apple through all of its hard times and various mistakes over the years. We recommended Apple to our friends and family and coworkers and colleagues. We told people, "If you're going to put your eggs in a basket, Apple is the best basket."

When they hosed the Final Cut Pro people, we all kind of watched like it was some kind of train wreck or car accident, but most of us didn't use FCP and so we just kind of shrugged and said amongst ourselves, "Well, they're moving away from the pro market, I guess." Many people and businesses were completely sideswiped by this and it really hurt some of them because of how much they had invested into Apple at the time.

Then we saw what happened with Pages and we thought, "Hmmm." This hits a little bit closer to home, but still, most of us didn't use Pages for much because we'd been Word users for so long, or maybe Nisus, etc. There were a lot of other options.

But I know a LOT of photographers who bought a Mac *specifically* to use Aperture. People who have spent **** near a decade investing countless hundreds, thousands of hours into their Aperture libraries. They *depend* on Aperture for their *livelihoods.* And now it's being simply dropped, with no fanfare, and NO confidence that what will "replace" it will be remotely acceptable as a replacement, now, or ever.

It all leaves us to wonder, what has Apple actually become? What kind of unthinking monster is this? It's no longer the warm friend we once knew, who seemed to read our minds and know what we really wanted, deep down inside, and then made it for us like a magical high tech Santa Clause. It has become that disappointing girlfriend who always gives you the crappiest gifts at Christmas and breaks something nice of yours on a regular basis. Sure, she's really pretty an hot, and knows everybody wants her, but that's precisely why she doesn't really care anymore about trying to really impress you. She knows you'll never leave. She just doesn't get it anymore.

But doesn't there come a time when enough is enough? I mean, when do we finally wake up and say to ourselves, "This is not Apple anymore… not the Apple we once knew. The old Apple would NEVER do this to people. Would it?" But the more I thought about that, the more I realized, "Yes, it would."

Apple was always this way. That's why we're not using MacPaint and MacWrite anymore, yet MS Word is still MS Word and Photoshop is still Photoshop. Because Apple is an ADHD company that gets fascinated with some software project and makes it, and makes it great, but eventually because that's not how it makes its bread and butter, that project eventually becomes the victim of the corporate machinery as the developers on that project get promoted to bigger and better, more important things at Apple, and soon enough the programmers who take over probably don't understand the codebase or really care about the project, because for them it's also just a stepping stone to something bigger and better within Apple.

Didn't they try to solve this by spinning off Claris, only to gobble it back up again at some point? I don't know.

At the end of the day, only Apple can change Apple. If we write enough letters to them and express enough anger and consternation about this, maybe this time, for once, they will listen. I mean, after all, Final Cut is still around, and they've added back a lot of the pro features. Logic Pro X somehow managed to avoid falling victim to the horrible trend, probably because music people are just awesome and think they already have the best jobs at Apple.

But gosh darn it, if you care about Aperture, you need to put together a protest, and go down and picket in Cupertino. I know you photographers could make a weekend junket out of it. Just think: all these photographers—people who, y'know, have lots of media connections and tons of followers online—show up at Apple and protest the demise of Aperture right on the streets of 1 Infinite Loop! **** yeah, put some pressure on 'em! I'll bet my old Mac SE/30 and IIfx collection that Apple would cave to such a demonstration in less than a day, and publicly commit to making Photos have EVERY feature of Aperture… AND THEN SOME.

Because at the end of the day, Apple isn't that snotty type of company who is too good to cater to the needs of the many. They're just that ADHD friend who gets caught up in whatever he's doing and doesn't realize that three years went by and Swift! We need to redo the whole thing in Swift for iCloud! Yeah woot hax0rz! Oh wait the photographers are ******.

...exactly..I am one of those photographers who sold Aperture to clients all over the world to build libraries on...Apple has killed my libraies and my reputation and dumped me in the street...so ****** off and betrayed...wasted so much time...they owe me an apology at the very least

We are thinking of buying a new Mac and never upgrading it just so we can keep our files available on Aperture into the future.

You may find it comforting to know that others do the same thing. In our organization we have many Macs dedicated to running iMovie HD 06. These machines are not even connected to the Internet ! They are dedicated to the SOLE purpose of editing movies. I know others who do the same thing.

I have no qualms about Aperture being discontinued. I just expected it to be replaced with something as good or better.

I won't even bring up the fact that Apple no longer makes a portable device that will store all my music.