Aperture to What?

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.

I am using Affinity Photo for working with layers, however I still use Aperture as a repository because I like having all the photos in a single place (actually, new library for each year).