Aperture has been the go-to photo organization, editing, and retouching app of choice on the Mac for professional and advanced amateur photographers since 2005. Today, all Aperture customers of record received an email from Apple noting that the app will no longer be available for purchase from the Mac App Store once Photos for OS X launches this spring. According to the email,
“You can continue to use Aperture on OS X Yosemite, but you will not be able to buy additional copies of the app.
You can migrate your Aperture library to Photos for OS X, including your photos, adjustments, albums and keywords. After migrating, your Aperture library remains intact. However, Aperture and Photos do not share a unified library, so any changes made after the migration will not be shared between the apps.
To learn more about Photos for OS X, click here. If you’re interested in trying the OS X 10.10.3 Public Beta, which includes Photos for OS X, click here.”
When Apple announced Photos for OS X Yosemite and iCloud Photo Library at WWDC last June, many professional photographers were upset with the news. While the new app does provide many of the organization and editing functions of Aperture in a much easier-to-use format, it doesn’t support the many third-party extensions that made Aperture such a powerful tool — at least yet. Some third-party alternatives that photographers may wish to consider include Adobe Lightroom or Corel AfterShot Pro 2. My suggestion? At least give Photos for OS X a try, and keep that working copy of Aperture on your Mac for the time being.
The death of a great program (note: not “app”). I have used this since its beginning (along with the usual suspects, PS Camera Raw.
The replacement, Photos for OSX, is a toy by comparison. The demise of Aperture, means that I will need to learn the C1Pro8 workflow, something I have been putting off for the years that I have owned it—it is a different beast to native Apple softwares.
Overall, a great disappointment. And if Apple ditched FCPX, then pretty much my entire professional workflow will need to be revised. Just the learning curve alone will mean that productivity will take a massive hit.
Much as I love my Macs, the increasing bugginess of The OS updates present problems. I installed yosemite on a thumb drive and could not stay on line with my WiFi. Thank God I didn’t install it on my hard drive.
I don’t know what Apple’s problem is with software bugs, but I suspect it would be a lot better if major OS releases were every 2 or 3 years instead of yearly. Regardless, I am not updating tthe OS on my computers until those updates become a lot moredependable.