At the annual WWDC earlier this month, Apple showed off its new Photos app for Mac OS X Yosemite, which will sync all your pictures across all your devices. The Photos app will mirror the iOS offering.
On Friday, the other shoe dropped with Apple announcing that it will no longer be developing its professional-grade photo editing app Aperture or consumer-grade app iPhoto, and it will instead replace them with Photos.
It’s unclear how many of Aperture’s features Photos will include, but users will likely need to search elsewhere for professional-grade solutions.
“With the introduction of the new Photos app and iCloud Photo Library, enabling you to safely store all of your photos in iCloud and access them from anywhere, there will be no new development of Aperture,” said Apple in a statement provided to The Loop. “When Photos for OS X ships next year, users will be able to migrate their existing Aperture libraries to Photos for OS.”
It’s likely that with the current competition, such as Adobe’s Lightroom, Apple no longer sees a reason to compete with more robust pro apps. Apple is also apparently planning to help users transition to Lightroom.
Ok, so I move to Lightroom. Cool. Now I don’t need to keep buying overpriced Macs.
Bubye Apple.
That is extremely disappointing news, I must say. As a power user of this excellent software all I can hope is that other developed be given access to its core, to further develop it. For me Lightroom simply is not an option. A real pity.
The assumption is that Photo won’t be an option?
I can’t imagine Photos having any real advanced features. It’ll be convenient for cell phone people, but if you have a stand-alone camera, I can’t see Photos being much for us. I suppose years with no upgrades should have tipped us off – I can’t imagine that actually IS an aperture team to begin with these days.
so what is it that Aperture can do that Lightroom can’t?
Aperture can run without Adobe Updater or Bridge being installed. Aperture can make photo libraries available for sharing with the iMedia Browser and the AppleTV
In general, Aperture has a better workflow in that is’t not so linear. For example, I can have my inspector side bar showing projects and folders, and then the HUD (head up display) showing the adjustments sliders etc. Also, in Apersture I don’t NEED to go back to the develop or library module to do things to an image or search, I can access Library / adjustments and any feature in any part of my process without leaving that specific area. Also I can have tabs open for each folder i.e. i have a folder with unrated images, I can have that open in the browser window and have the folder tab of the rated images and do side by side comaprison then rate another image and see it jump to the rated folder. Also Apertures highlight recovery is in a word “superior” I even have LR users ask me to recover highlights for them every now and then… I could go on but no point any more. over all LR is clunky in comparison.
You have to use Adobe’s subscription only approach. That’s $120/year, every year. I bought Aperture once, for $100 (academic). That’s the main point that really pisses me off … but i’m also not looking forward to Adobe’s workflow which is very different, and non-intuitive to me.