A Lament for Aperture

They will soon add Photomator app to Apple Creator Studio. They have bought Pixelmator team last year and since Pixelmator is already in this bundle, I think the next app will be Photomator, a pretty close replacement for Aperture.

I miss Aperture dearly, too. It is a monument of a time when Apple still could do Software, instead of just Services that feel restrictive and patronizing. I cannot get myself to use that shitty Photos app and am still constantly on the lookout for something to recreate the Aperture of old.

Nitro comes close:

https://www.gentlemencoders.com/nitro-for-macos/

I still mourn the loss of Aperture. IMO the best pro software Apple ever made. Lightroom was always a distant second for RAW photo workflows, and Photos is still a far cry.

I still keep all my digital photos and film scans, except those photos that originate from a Leaf or Phase One digital back, in Aperture. (the raw format of those digital backs pretty much requires Capture One.) The machine does not visit the internet because it needs 10.14 to run and there haven't been security updates in a while.

Sigh. After Apple suddenly discontinued Aperture, which left users like me with huge complex photo archives hanging, I will never trust any professional software tool from Apple again. It is a disaster that I still haven't fully recovered from.

I've learned my lesson — all my archives will now be maintained by me, in file structures, with metadata in text files.

And yes, I agree with the article, Aperture was a really good piece of software, with many design decisions that seemed controversial, but were driven by many hours spent with professional photographers, looking at their workflows and listening to them. The result was very good.

There is sort of a correlation here:

> AI for some reason, and amongst the complaining in the comments you’ll invariably find it: “I miss Aperture.”

and:

> Apple released macOS Tahoe, which has been pretty constantly raked over the coals for poor design and broken interactions from the day it was released (and even before, if we’re honest).

Of course this may not indicate causation, but I believe that the AI hype has also in part led to a decline in quality overall. Not necessarily everywhere, but there is almost definitely some influence that degraded things. I see this all the time on youtube videos or Google search. In fact, I recently also switched to other search engines; they have issues too, but Google search consistently yields worse results nowadays, even when the search string used excludes AI and other things. The quality declined overall. (And on youtube you can not even really search for much at all, Google tends to show some unrelated crap after some time. They are deliberately trying to waste time of humans.)

Aperture is dearly missed even today. And to make matters worse: you cannot even import Aperture libraries into Photos any more. Essentially leaving you with picking out the raw images from the package. And don’t get me started on excellent support for tethered shooting in a studio setting. And I could go on and on. The only thing I really missed in Aperture was first level support for Nik tools which are cool for their adaptive and non destructive masks.

Someone should vibe code a new version of Aperture

> It was powered by some of the most impressive technology around at the time, but you’d never even know it because you were too busy getting shit done.

If you're busy getting shit done you will not have time to engage with ads. That became a problem once technology switched from being a tool to an advertising delivery vehicle.

I went from Aperture to LR 5 to DXO and Affinity. But nothing beats Aperture.

And here I thought it’ll be about Portal.