Q: Replacement to Aperture

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

try Capture One Pro 8 and Media publisher from the same company..VERY pro

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.

Agree pretty much but you can't blame Steve Jobs!

I don't intend to be mean, but c'mon. Aperture was being neglected for years. Apple has started and dumped all kinds of products (if we had Apple discussions back then they'd probably be full of angst about MacPaint...). If you commit all your intellectual energy and much of your work to a proprietary product, or even hardware, you are misguided. If you do that at a business, well, not very businesslike.

That doesn't mean you can't be annoyed at Apple's decision. But time to move on. There are many equivalent software solutions, some that work on other hardware as well (or both with the same license). Yeah some will complain it's not as good, but mostly the differences are personal preferences in interface. It's really tough to argue that you can't wind up with the same result in a photo or organization with LR, Capture One, etc.

So look at yourselves a bit. Apple has made some great hardware for use with images, and still does...look at the retina MBPs and iMacs. Software developers make great software to run on them. There are other toys in the sandbox; use them.

Rob,

Your point is well made but unfortunately your basic premise that you can do the same with other packages is off track.  The reality is that as a DAM Aperture is pretty much in a class of it's own.  Sure for editing and image manipulation there are other, and in some cases better, options out there.  The majority of comments here are from people with a lot of time and money invested in DAM.  If you can suggest a viable alternative that can replace Aperture and recatalogue multiple terabytes of images please let us know.

What we are seeing here is not like MacDraw.  Its more like Oracle turning round saying we are going to discontinue our database and offering no alternative forcing a major rework for all their customers to switch to MySQL or MSSQL.  Your suggestion that it is unprofessional top standardise on one software solution is incredibly misguided.  Are you telling me that your business uses both Microsoft Office and Open office or Pages?  Do you use both PowerPoint and Keynote interchangeably?  These are simple situations but when you start looking at specialist systems like DAM or in the software world configuration management systems standardisation on a single solution is the norm not the exception.

Good question about the office. We use .doc files, which althought they are MS they are written and read by most everything. And PDFs. And text. My IT guys say I gotta use Excel, and when moving stuff around we use CSV, text, etc. In other words, stick as much as possilble to anything non-proprietary.

Photos are even a better example. They HAVE built in standards for metadata via IPTC, exif, XMP and DNG. That covers considerable ground, but not adjustments from RAW. But you can use TIFF or JPEG. You only lose the PIE data; meaning you lose you stored parameters for image adjustment. You didn't have to do that; you could export. Maybe it's easier for those of us that remember negatives and printing; prints were unique. Like an export. If we did it again, stuff might change no matter how many notes we took or tried to stick to the same equipment or chemicals or paper. Many of us didn't think that was a minus.

LR can hold just about as much as you can put in; the limit is usually elsewhere. I've corresponded with people with over a million images (IMHO people with that much stuff should move to real databases, but that's another question). Yes, moving that will be awful. Which is why I'm suggesting that perhaps people shouldn't get themselves into that situation...again. The ONLY info in a PIE like Aperture or LR that is proprietary, and hence stays in Aperture or LR, is the parameters of image adjustment. Again, you can export the finished image. What you lose is the ability to take those parameters, like a blueprint, to make new exports (and generally most of us adjust images so as to export or use them, not simply look at them in Apertuer or LR). But you can still process a new image from that original RAW. All the other organizational info can be retained via the metadata in the images themselves. I replicated my Aperture project/folder/album structure just using keywords; it required a bit of moving around in LR but it wasn't that big a deal.

I have no doubt there are situations where one has to store lots of adjustments in a PIE and there's no way around that. Maybe you have clients who want the same image with slight variations over and over. Fine. In that case choose a solution that is more likely to last than Apple's stuff. And prepare for it. We did that with WordPerfect; we had tons of templates and stuff and knowing we'd probably lose it we set up workflows so that content was saved as text, so that it could be reused in new Word templates/styles with minimal editing. That also meant we could make use of new features, as one can in new DAMs that have better RAW processing than Aperture, for instance. It was a bit annoying at times, but it also meant we didn't have to try to do mass conversions of WP documents when we finally went all Word. Lots of people are dealing the adjustment issue by exporting just jpegs of versions to LR; they then use the JPEGs as visual exemplars of what they want but process the RAW anew. They might get better results, or they could use the Aperture exported image.

In fact many can get by without the need for a PIE at all. After Shot Pro, eg, works as both a browser, and can store stuff in a library. It can write it's own XMP with image adjustment info, not using any database.

Aperture was in a class by its own for perhaps a few months. It's been in competiton with Lr since almost the start, and with many others since. I know lotsa of people are both very (over?) committed to it, and love it, but it is not unique in any fundamental way. This or that tool works better or worse, some like the RAW processing Apple does, some don't. I suppose a managed library is kinda unique, although I don't see how. It's just a big package. I used Aperture a lot, and still do, but people have been moving off it for a long time, and complaining about Apple killing it is just more wasted energy.

By dumping Aperture in favour of Photos as an upgrade to iPhoto, Apple have pandered to the lowest common denominator of iOS device phone camera users and turned away serious photographers be they amateur or professional . On the other hand Apple may have done me a huge favour in forcing me to up my game .

For me, Aperture substitute contenders are either Capture One Pro 8 or DxO Optics Pro 10 - They both are said to have superior RAW Converters to Lightroom and probably to Apple's as well. So far I am having difficulty deciding which one.

Yes, I think you are correct about that Red Robin. I knew that there were tools out there that were better then Aperture but I was too lazy to undertake the work and expense of migrating to them.

Having said all of that I am lean more towards Capture One. With what I seen about it to meet my needs better then DxO. I have to two back to back trips coming up here soon, when I return from them I am going to download a demo. My big question at the moment is do I need Media One also. I am searching for information to help with that question.

I have stopped all work on Aperture since it seems senseless to add to the migration workload.

There is also software often provided with a new camera = DPP [Digital Photo Professional] is packaged with Canon products = I haven't yet moved to it - I am still using Aperture and will as long as possible, but that may be an avenue.

Canon's DPP has a somewhat 'clunky' Windows-esque interface and the RAW Converter not as good as in Capture One Pro 8 which also has far more power and potential when post-processing RAW.

DPP is free but I am moving from Aperture to Capture One Pro 8 and have decided I may as well do it sooner rather than later and I can still keep Aperture and its library intact.

An opinion from the weeds:

Canon’s DPP is slow, from my experience: It feels radically different than Aperture.

Can be true of any software, but it doesn’t entice me & from what time I’ve spent: doesn’t have the same feature set as a manager.

There are also competing Canon apps / app versions (separate from DPP) which on my computer, collide with each other. That may be because I’ve never had occasion to spend a lot of time investigating them carefully, nevertheless I have used them to get images from camera to computer becaue of the lag in DPP, which is why I mention them here.

Hoping for a new app from Apple: If there’s a new professional level application in the wings by Apple, it is a bad choice not to clue people. Once one has migrated to a 3rd party app & paid the cost of said application, there is no reason to ever go back. Migration to something new is a separate cost in this.

I haven’t read every post in this thread (gives me a headache in my eye to consider it).

The question would be managing Aperture edited versions of images while migrating. Ostensibly the masters would require re-editing to achieve the final copies, correct? Or exported as standalone copies to retain the edits.

IF I am correct, how does one manage those cleanly?

iPhoto needed a major facelift: No question there.

It was awkward for people to manage - those who want to operate from iOS cameras, or weren’t camera nerds or professionals.

Completely dumping Aperture doesn’t appear a smart way to operate.

The outliers who require or want the superior tools are what helped make Apple.

I’m trying to decide what is worth the time you’ve already put in:

Can you elaborate about the feature sets between the 2 apps you are undecided about?

What’s a strength in each, the other doesn’t address well, or is a linchpin for you? (Assuming this is an appropriate forum for such conversation).

Yes, I agree that Capture One is the way to go. I am finding that it is the Aperture 4 that we have been waiting for all of these years. Now that they have added tools to help with the migration from Aperture C1, I think it is the way to go.

Had same problem. Moved to CaptureOne. Seamless transfer of large Aperture Catalog, kept the structure intact and did not discard any added EXIF comments etc.

Downside is a VERY steep learning curve on CaptureOne, however lots of video tutorials available. Available to buy or rent, expensive, but much cheaper than Photoshop.  Still very annoyed with Apple. Photos is just a toy at the moment.