Absent Aperture

I’m disappointed that MacFormat 276 nor 277 considered Apple’s announcement that Aperture is coming to an end and won’t be updated, and that Aperture and iPhoto will be replaced by ‘Photos’ in Yosemite.

For amateur photographers, Aperture has been the ideal app: it has far better photo editing capabilities than iPhoto; it has good photo management capabilities; it was relatively cheap; and, best of all, it was an Apple product that worked seamlessly with all of the other bits of OS X. I run Aperture 3 on Mavericks and like them both and had been looking forward to Aperture 4.

I dislike the Adobe business model where you’re obliged to rent software, and although Apple has yet to fully declare its hand on Photos, I also dislike the idea of storing my photographs and data in the Cloud (recent security breaches, anyone?). With over 19GB of photos, I don’t want to pay anyone to store my photographs in a leaky cloud system when I can do that more securely on my MacBook Pro, backed up by two Time Machines and an offsite portable HDD.

So why has MacFormat been silent on the imminent demise of Aperture and iPhoto? Why haven’t you given us some inkling of what Photos will be like?

I guess at least there’s a discussion thread on lightroomkillertips.com on how simple it is to migrate to another app from Aperture. The best current advice for Aperture users seems to be to sit tight and see what functionality Apple puts in Photos before making a decision. I would liked to have heard that from MacFormat, though… George Wilton Christopher Phin says: There’s a lot going on here, but the key thing is that we haven’t talked much about Photos because we don’t really know enough yet. It’s not due to arrive until early 2015, and Apple has only showed it off very briefly. Our impression is that it sits somewhere between iPhoto and Aperture, which will likely leave some people without powerful tools in Aperture they rely on. You might have noticed, however, that there’s a guide to Adobe Lightroom in this issue (page 42) for Aperture (or new) users who are considering moving to it (and you can buy Lightroom outright – you don’t need to “rent” it).

However, as far as we know, George, Photos won’t only store your images in the cloud – that would be madness for performance when we could be talking about huge raw images, and would stop you editing offline! We’re sure you’ll still be able to back up to as many places as you like.

And there’s one other thing to remember: Aperture still works, at least for a while!