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.
It's not silly because it's true. The only disservice I see here are broad endorsements of inferior alternative products that are severely lacking compared to Aperture and which will require tedious and time consuming library migration processes that will nonetheless result in tons of lost work.
As I've pointed out before, Aperture serves two complementary but distinct functions: 1) image editing/processing and 2) digital asset management. I agree that there are other products on the market which offer comparable or even superior editing and post-processing capabilities, such as Adobe Lightroom. However, there are no alternatives that offer image library management features as efficient and intuitive as Aperture's. Moreover, none of these software alternatives (especially Adobe) offer any sort of integration with iCloud Photo Library. Adobe even refuses to provide Lightroom extensions for Photos, as they're blatantly trying to force users to abandon Apple's cloud services in favor of their own.
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.
Most of those I see here share the common sentiment that there is a dearth of suitable replacements for Aperture and that the migration process will be painful and ultimately unsatisfactory.
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.
Once again, an ignorant and misleading statement that ignores the fact that Aperture is not merely an image editor but a full-featured digital asset management product, seamlessly integrated into the Apple ecosystem. there are no currently available alternatives that offer comparable DAM capabilities.
Even Photos, which I agree is no Aperture substitute, does a better job of iCloud integration. And has more modern plugins/extensions.
This is sounding more and more like a political argument, with one side prone to frequently changing the subject to distract the audience from its shortcomings. Of course Photos has better iCloud integration than Aperture! That was the primary goal of its development. But Photos is targeted at basic users and offers only limited editing and organization tools. The selection of editing extensions, two years after its release, remains limited and basic, with companies like Adobe intentionally refusing to provide extensions since, as I already pointed out, they are pushing their lousy cloud services to compete with Apple's.
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.
And with that asinine statement, you have lost any shred of credibility you had left. First of all, most people are aware of the big differences between Google's and Apple's business models. One of these companies makes it's money by harvesting user data to sell advertising, essentially treating their users as their product. The other is focused entirely on their users and has a long track record of defending their users' privacy.
More importantly, though, your Jennifer Lawrence reference was moronic. The scandal you're alluding to, where a number of celebrities had their personal photos publicly released by hackers, was facilitated by social engineering attacks that exploited the use of the same, weak passwords across multiple online services. At no time were Apple's servers breached. In other words, if you're a celebrity and you use your dog's name as your password on every website you visit, eventually one of those sites will be compromised and the attacker will be able to use your weak login credentials to access more secure sites you visited with the same credentials.
To summarize:
- Aperture is no longer supported by Apple and users will eventually need to choose a replacement.
- A suitable replacement must offer comparable image editing AND image cataloging features.
- While there are numerous alternatives on the market, none of them are very compelling for reasons including:
- Inferior or nonexistent digital asset management features
- Lack of iCloud Photo Library integration
- Tedious and time consuming migration process, with extensive loss of previous organization and edits
- Unconventional, unintuitive, non-Mac native user interfaces with steep learning curves
- Poor performance and stability
- High purchase/licensing costs
