Apple made it official today and it’s ending future development on Aperture. First mentioned on The Loop, this was not a suprise to me (and to others like Daring Fireball) because of the lack of any significant updates over the last few years — in fact, the biggest change to the program, when they updated it to use the same photo database structure as iPhotos, can now be seen as some long-term planning towards this day by making the migration of that content much easier. This has clearly been the plan for some time.
iPhoto is also being retired, in favor of the Photos app, which with Yosemite will be the primary photo app on MacOS and continuing Apple’s alignment of apps that do similar functions working together with its IOS peer.
What now?
The good news is — current Aperture users don’t need to panic. Apple will make Aperture work with the upcoming Yosemite release, so if you want to do nothing for now, you can. There’s a safe landing path for you where you can take your time and not have to deathmarch your way to some new photo processing solution. I’ve heard there are migration tools coming with Apple and Adobe working on them together, but I don’t have details yet. John Beardsworth has a really good page for people looking to migrate from Aperture to Lightroom — I’ve recommended it to a number of people in the past and it’s been a big help to them. Adobe has used this announcement to tell folks its doubling down on Lightroom, whatever that means — they give no details.
I expect most Aperture users will end up migrating to Lightroom because of this change. It’s currently the only serious pro-level organization and processing tool.
I’m glad Apple did this. it was clear for a while that Aperture wasn’t really in their future plans, and it sat there on the product list, falling further behind on the technology curve. This makes it clear to userss what to expect in the future (nothing) so it helps them make decisions and move forward, but it also does the same for Apple. By retiring both iPhoto and Aperture it frees apple to reinvent it’s photo apps from scratch and leave the legacy tools behind, and given their future emphasis on cloud and what I’m seeing on the photos app, it would have been tough to move Aperture into that model in any way, much less do it well. By throwing all that out, they can now build the functionality into Photos without splitting resources off to beat the legacy code into submission.
Long-term, I think this is good for everyone. Short term, it causes some disruption for the users who hadn’t figured out Aperture had gone zombie years ago, but it seems everyone is saying the right things about making the transition as painless as possible. we’ll see how reality matches the press releases.
It’s sad to see Aperture retired. I was an early adopter of the first version and loved it. I know people who built it. I had great hopes for it — but obviously, I gave up and moved to Lightroom years ago, and for once, I guessed right. Apple clearly has a plan for photos moving forward and by retiring Aperture it frees them to move this forward. One thing Apple does that most oompanies don’t is that they’re willing to take a short term hit for a long term ability to innovate. In a couple of years, I’m expecting great things with Apple and photos. For now, we also have Lightroom for the serious users and pros to cover their needs. Hopefully we’ll see a technology fight for dominance between Lightroom and Apple’s new Photos develop, because honestly, Aperture lost that fight and stopped trying at least four years ago…
For more info on this, Mashable seems to have the best overall coverage.
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