The end of an era

There is another piece to this debacle. I am not a professional photographer but I am a very serious amateur, and I do a LOT of nature photography. I am often out in the boonies for a week or more at a time living out of my motorhome. With Photos wanting to "help" me by syncing all of my photos to the cloud so that I can see lower res copies on my iPad or my iPhone, that is going to eat many gig of my precious cellular data plan because out in the boonies, there are no T1 (or better) lines, just weak, slow wifi in some campgrounds and my cellular data card. I know I can turn off the iCloud syncing in Photos, but then, what is the point of it? And if you turn it on, how long would it take a serious photographer, amateur or pro, to exceed the iCloud data limit and be required to buy one of their expensive plans? Frankly, if I want to share photos across devices, I just copy them to Dropbox. For $99 per year I get 1T of data. It doesn't add metadata, but then, from what I can see, neither does Photos (at least not like Aperture).

I have found what I think is a great cloud website, it is a part of Shutterfly that I use for my books sometimes, it will also store pictures on the shutterfly albums but the one I like is ThisLife, photos are free except for videos now and it is unlimited storage plus it seems to be similar to the photos on ICloud, so far I have 44,000 pictures that I have found all over the place in my computer and haven't even started on my Aperture libraries. That might be good for you to look into , you can access it from all of your devices, it does give some exif information and even puts place names that I didn't realize where we were... Give it a try and let me know

after upgrading the OS, iPhotos (and Aperture for that matter) should still be in the Applications folder...

And running well in 10.10.3.

If it stops running in a next "update" do not throw it away: most apps will continue running as follows:

In the Applications folder "rightclick" (CTL+click) the iPhoto app, then "show package contents", then click the MacOs folder open: you see the real app (dark grey), rightclick this and choose "make alias", an alias is made, move this alias to the Applications folder and use it to run iPhoto.

Same for Aperture.

In older OS this survived several upgrades....

I was not aware of "This Life." Looks like a good option. For now, I think I will stick with my current work flow - I do everything in Aperture and store my older libraries on an external 2TB portable drive. I can access them in the field without burning cellular data. If I need/want to share photos with my other Apple devices, I can simply upload them to Dropbox when I have a good internet connection - or sync them through a tethered iTunes connection without burning cellular data. Apple's iCloud would come out to $240 per year for Dropbox gives for $99. Not very good business, Apple. I do appreciate your making me aware of "This Life"; I will definitely keep that in mind as something to think about.

I, too, switched from Extensis Portfolio to Aperture for digital asset management reasons and because Microsoft acquired Portfolio and destroyed it for us. Now Apple has abandoned Aperture to cater to those that cannot operate a camera but take 50,000 selfies and share them with everyone. So much for "professional" apps from Apple. I am p----ed and an Apple shareholder to boot.

I can't figure it out either. Microsoft has just about destroyed whatever credibility they had left with the release of Windows 8. Then they beat a hasty retreat from the pure cell phone look and feel lock-in with the release of 8.1. And I'll be ****** if Apple isn't following the same path. Flat buttons and a flat look and feel in the windowing system, discarding Aperture, catering to the L.C.D. of cell phone users. Will the system development aspect of OS X wither and die? Will Xcode, Objective C, Swift and the rest go the way of Aperture. Steve Jobs came out of the software and hardware industry and was probably fiercely protective of it at Apple. With Jobs gone, we have suits and followers in charge, and the outlook is grim. However, cell phone apps still have to be written, so there is always hope.

A very big Dito. I have never felt so trapped by an application. Generally I have always found improvements in everythng Apple as offered since 1984. I got my first Mac as a gift in 1986, (My first computer was in kit form) upgraded to the mac plus the next year which lasted till 1997. Bought the first intel iMac in 2006 and others before and after.

I don't think I like Lightroom or anything else I've read about. I might if there was some way to convert my changes. Thinking of exporting my changed photos to a non jpg format that I can convert to DNG and move to something else non apple that has most of the features of aperture. keep Aperture for going back to raw for individual pics when and if I need to do some additional editing and use the New system (unknown) for future pics. I have about 75,000 photos.

Sad day and feeling lost don't know what to do. Such an investment in time and energy. And how to move on

Maybe they will reconsider or someone will make them a good offer for Aperture and take it to the next step.

You can still run iPhoto and/or Aperture.

I used adobe Elements in those old days, then switched to Mac and kept on using it, but the organising was not as in Windows: it was two apps Elements and Bridge. Then I changed to Lightroom. And use it since. From time to time I used iPhoto and Aperture to keep my knowledge fresh. But when it was announced that Aperture was about to be no longer supported, Adobe built in plugins, that import the Aperture library and now the iPhoto and Aperture library. My road is much smaller now, Lightroom is fantastic. But Lightroom as it is now is disappearing also, everything moves to Creative Cloud: doing your work in the cloud, this brings much more money to Adobe.

But you can still use iPhoto and Aperture (and I Lightroom) as a standalone app.

Lex

I really like ThisLife which is a part of Shutterfly, you can't edit anything on it but can store them and view them on your devices as it is in a Cloud environment. I have over 50,000 pictures on it and haven't even started on my Aperture libraries this was just ones on my computer and my external drives. Watch your uploading as I went over my limit a couple of times.... I am going to keep still using Aperture for my photos editing and arranging, I am still using IDVD that is so old but I still like it for some of my projects. I had a lesson on the Photos at the Apple store and it is not bad on the mac book but on my Ipad I really can't see what it is doing.... Tried on the Apple Watch and it is kinda neat but if you are traveling and don't have wifi you still need your phone which I don't use out of Canada so, not on my list of neat to get yet

Also ThisLife stores unlimited photos free.....

Well, I finally decided to get around to dumping Aperture. Being only a consumer-level user, I tested Photos one more time. I really really tried to like it but I could not. It is as lacking now as I thought it was a few months ago. It is not even worth the price (free). Capture One looks very interesting but is more than I need and more expensive than Lightroom. I disliked Lightroom's workflow when I made the Lightroom vs Aperture decision years ago but Lightroom beats Photos hands down no contest. My only concern is one day being forced into Adobe's subscription model, that they will discontinue the individual purchase.

I have become so turned off by Apple software over the past few years. I loved Numbers and Pages but instead of improving them, they dumbed them down to match what the iPad can do. They removed features that I needed, made many things harder to do and removed backward compatibility. Back to Excel and Word for me. I went through the whole Final Cut Studio to Final Cut Pro X debacle where no previous work translated to the new version. I like the new version but, given Apple's history, I am waiting for the "Aperture" shoe to fall on it, too, some day. I loved Aperture until they discontinued it with no viable replacement. I am now more concerned about PC compatibility of my files (spreadsheet, word processing, and all) than anything else. With the emphasis so strong on their iOS devices, I get the feeling the iMacs will start to gravitate toward iOS and get neutered for power users, forcing me back to Windows (a horrible thought). But that's where I stand right now, I am picking software that is also PC compatible because I don't trust Apple to have my back. Also, I used to enjoy these forums until they changed the software, dumbing it down and making it harder to use. If I held Apple stock, this would be the day I would be selling it.