Will Aperture 3.6 work in Mac OS Sierra?

I upgraded to Sierra last week, iPhoto and Aperture greyed out, I couldn't click on either of them

You need to have the current versions of them.

when I clicked on, it lead me to iCloud. Don't know what had happened to all my photos. I couldn't open photos in iCloud unless I agree to pay for iCloud storage monthly fee.

Actually, it said no such thing. What you see is a marketing plug for the service, which you can ignore. But if you don't read carefully you get this...

but it still says I need to upgrade storage to see photos.

So go back and read carefully what it says. Remember you do not need to use iCloud at all, much less pay fo it to see your photos.

I am honest and warning people out there.

You are confused. Your warnings are unnecessary and carry significant risk in themselves, that you don't warn others about. As well as the privacy concerns I'm referring to things like downsizing large images, failure to maintain organisational structure and other dataloss. Like I said, we have a tradition of warning others of the consequences of our advice on this board. You need to respect that.

Here's another symptom of your confusion:

And you deleted my post b/c it was bad publicity

I have no ability to delete any posts. I'm just an ordinary user of this forum, exactly like you. And even at that, your confusion is not bad publicity for anybody except yourself. Seriously, read the terms of use you agreed to when you signed up to the forum.

aperture and iPhoto will disappear

Nothing will "disappear". iPhoto has been rebooted as Photos. The new app is much faster and leaner than its predecessor and handles the cloud natively instead of as an afterthought. Since it's so new, obviously it will take a little time to catch up with some of the features lost with iPhoto's retirement. Good for most casual users, but not a substitute for Aperture.

Aperture is no longer officially supported but appears to be running ok for most people under the latest Sierra release. It would be wise to seek a replacement before it becomes incompatible with a future macOS release but, unfortunately, there's nothing on the market that comes even close in terms of image management features, performance, usability, UI design, or integration with iCloud.

you need to pay apple storage plan to see your lost photos

Once again, photos are not "lost" unless you lose them yourself. Stop whining about Apple's fee-based cloud services. The future is in the cloud (or the present, in my opinion) and everyone is offering cloud-based solutions with varying levels or quality, security, privacy, and costs.

Backup your pics in Google photo overnight, it will do it automatically and categorize them for you. It's free

Beware of any product or service billing itself as "free" since there is no such thing. It's foolish to entrust one's personal data to a company like Google, a company lacking any sort of consistent vision or taste, whose business model revolves around the relentless harvesting of its users' personal data for sale to advertisers and data aggregators.

With all that cash they have and spend a billion dollars buying a head phone company! I can't get my head around why they aren't supporting their own photo software, and I don't mean that crap Photos. Eventually I will have to migrate out of apple products. Just wish Tim Cook would wake up and smell the coffee. After all the company HAS the money.

The assertion that "there's nothing on the market that comes even close in terms of image management features, performance, usability, UI design, or integration with iCloud" is just silly and a disservice to those seeking advice here. I suppose that in a forum for a dying product you'd find a lot of die-hard users, but some who come here are just looking for alternatives and may not even have such strongly held opinions on the worth of Aperture. Sure, you may prefer it, but in fact every thing Aperture does can be replicated in a variety of other software products, and often in a better manner. Even Photos, which I agree is no Aperture substitute, does a better job of iCloud integration. And has more modern plugins/extensions.

And speaking of the cloud, while I agree Google may be a poor choice for some who are interested in privacy, one should also do some due diligence around entrusting Apple to auto-store your images. Ask Jennifer Lawrence, et al. 😉Apple's "free" stuff may not be your best choice either, especially when there are other services that may be more secure (and one should also consider where in the world that storage is, since that can matter too...not every country has the same privacy rules).

one should also do some due diligence around entrusting Apple to auto-store your images. Ask Jennifer Lawrence, et al

With respect, as has been demonstrated multiple times, there was no hack of Apple's servers in those incidents. The failing was, on each occasion, that the user chose easily guessed passwords. That is how those accounts were breached and that can happen with any service and any user. The key to preventing those kinds of breaches is having unguessable passwords...

Further, the privacy issue with Google Photos is not the only one, and it quite clearly states that they scale larger images, impose their own organisation structure and so on.

On your main point I quite agree. The processing and management tools in Aperture were state of the art a few years ago, but the art has moved on considerably.

Well stated.

Just a reminder - iCloud Photo Library is not an archival storage service. It is a sync service. So, you wouldn't want to choose that for storing your photos anyway. Any edits, changes, deletions you make on any device signed into that iCloud Photo Library will result in that photo being edited, changed, or deleted across all devices as well as iCloud.

Cheers,

GB

Hi Nikontraveler,

I found that iPhoto and Aperture also worked for me once I upgraded to Yosemite from Mountain Lion, and then on to El Cap and to Sierra. However, not sure if you are aware that Photos not only has better editing capabilities than iPhoto, but the one thing that I found to be a great addition was that you can access your photo extensions directly in Photos, which means you can apply the edits and save them without having to resize windows so you can drag and drop and all of the other hassles:

Personally, I found this to be one of the best features of Photos! 🙂

Cheers,

GB

Personally, I found this to be one of the best features of Photos!

I love the editing extensions too. I think by now I have spent more money on editing extensions for Photos than I ever spent on Aperture! 😁

But it is really easy to have them directly listed right in the Edit menu, and all editing extensions are having the same look and feel. And the External Editors Editing extension is making it possible to switch between several external editors, without having to change the preferences everytime, like in Aperture.

Don't know if it will help others. I haven't moved from Aperture yet and haven't tried Capture One, but one pro photographer I follow has transitioned largely to Capture One and he has various postings on the subject: How an Aperture Library Looks After Imported to Capture One and searching all posts.

One bit of advice he posted is when trying new software is to experiment with a small collection before making the jump to importing all your files. That may have helped Nikontraveler avoid some pitfalls. I'm not pushing Capture One although it sounds good—not cheap and I'm hoping Photos will be enough for my needs when I need to change. I'm not looking forward to starting over with a new software.

I don't know whether this will help you, but at least when I tried Capture One, it would not import tiff files and perhaps even psd (not sure about psd).

I have been successful in transitioning Aperture Libraries to Lightroom CC (a total of about 400,000 images in several different Libraries). After I did each smaller Aperture Library (20,000-45,000 images) and had it in Lightroom, I then consolidated the smaller catalogues into two very large catalogues.

I made sure my Aperture Libraries were all referenced, no missing files, nothing in Trash and etc. If you want to know more, just email me.

Nikontraveler, did you do your import using Capture One Pro 9 or 10?

Version 10 was just released a couple of weeks ago and I've found it to be worlds better in performance than 9. I haven't gotten so far as to attempt a whole library import as I've been just trying out about a dozen Aperture replacements to see how I'd like the workflow and results. I really hope CO 10 is able to handle my libraries. It's the only program that has the Aperture feel that I like and is any good. Corel Aftershot Pro is another one, but its image processing is so bad that it's not even worth considering.