Say Goodbye to iPhoto and Aperture
After announcing a new Photos app for Mac, due early next year, Apple has confirmed to The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple that it is ceasing development of iPhoto and Aperture. Apple’s statement to The Loop reads, “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. When Photos for OS X ships next year, users will be able to migrate their existing Aperture libraries to Photos for OS X.” The company emphasized that development on its other professional apps, like Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro, will continue.
As a recent purchaser of Aperure 3.5 and a big fan of its price point and comprehensive set of features this is very depressing news. It is not clear to me how a Cloud Library can kill off the need for this terrific product. Working from the cloud is no joy to any photographer who does more than point and shoot.
The question is what features and capabilities of Aperure will be retained in Photo?
Your guess is as good as mine, but TechCrunch got a more recent screenshot of Photos that looks much different (and more advanced) than what we saw at WWDC, so there may be some hope.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/27/apple-to-cease-development-of-aperture-and-transition-users-to-photos-for-os-x/
Apple historically mucks up transitions like this. Worries me significantly that Apple feels professional photographers can and should jeopardize their, in some cases life's, collection of good, bad and sensational images.
Been using Aperture since day one. Tried Lightroom, didn't like it. If Photo bombs, thousands of us will have to learn it.
I'll stick with Aperture though, until Apple follows their historical path and writes an OS upgrade, or a hardware upgrade that will render Aperture broken. Hope that it works until the average year I'm supposed to kick the bucket, between 6 and 8 years from now!!
There's a useful comparison made earlier this month comparing different alternatives to Aperture. He covers them all in considerable detail over many pages.
http://www.nomadlens.com/raw-converters-comparison
I've been quietly impressed with Capture One I have to say. The editing features are very nice indeed and it seems to behave well with my referenced images from Aperture. I'm seeing how long it will take for it to take them all on (50k+ imagery).
A lot lost of course, the edits and corrections etc. Shows the value of exporting a final outcome and having that at least.
I'm also checking out Iridient Developer, reviewed above as well. It's very technical but has features none other do. Not a DAM though, you need to organise separately. But it was the first to support my new Fuji XT-1, and does a lovely job to judge from the trial.
What about iPhoto? Other than in the title and first sentence, there isn't any discussion. Also in the quoted statement, only Aperture libraries are mentioned as being able to be migrated the Aperture replacement;total silence as to whether or not iPhoto libraries will. Any suggestions for a good iPhotos replacement?
Regarding the continuation of Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro, the statement sounds like a "the check is in the mail" statement.
I don't know about an iPhotoreplacement. I do know that unless things have chained recently, when you move shots from iPhoto to elements, all the tech data and keywords stay behind. I don;t relish the job of copying all the meta-data on thousands of photos.
iPhoto and Aperture use the same library format, so there should be no issues with that.
From the The Loop: "The new Photos app will also replace iPhoto, giving users a more seamless experience on Apple devices."
Photos will probably be a suitable replacement for iPhoto.
It seems to be, that Apple always neglects to provide continuity of their systems. They dropped Works without successors for all document types, removed web sharing, crippled iWork, removed FrontRow, removed hfs support etc. People don't want to relearn things every few years. And forcing users to the cloud is a very bad idea.
Some links suggested on TidBITS Talk...
Aperture is Dead. Long Live Photos!
Comment Follow-up on the Demise of Aperture
I am not going back to Apple for something like Aperture ever again. Not that it wasn't quite usuable; it was. As Aperture aged I jumped ship to LR. I wasn't particularly prescient, Apple just lagged on RAW. Figured I could make gradual transition.
What I found is that Apple makes it very difficult to exit out of Aperture with your metadata, storage structure, and edits intact. I can understand edits; they are sort of proprietary in that LR or Capture One can't be expected to figure out what a particular change in contrast is. But you can't even export keywords without exporting. How lame is that?
Seeing that as I transitioned to LR (which can export all of that BTW; I use both it and Capture One now) I decided never again to commit data to Apple's locked in data schemes. And commit to Apple Cloud storage after MobileMe, etc? You'd have to be nuts.
There are lots of good, and actually better, photo managers and processors out there. You'll be happier if you take the hint and move on.
This really worries me. My wife has a LARGE iPhoto library of shots from all over the world, for natural history purposes. They're minutely identified (location, genus, species etc) in searchable iPhoto description fields, so that she can assemble illustrations for lectures and papers.
We started doing this because I believed that with OS-X Apple were serious about metadata. But we've become more and more sceptical - you can't, AFAIK, export from iPhoto with full metadata including descriptions to anything other than an iPhoto library. Duh... I hope I'm wrong about this.
Will Photos be a genuine replacement? I really don't want to have to confess to my wife that I misled her over Apple's commitment to metadata!
And still less to have to say that she'll need (at best) to have to learn to use a new application...