Apple pulls plug on Aperture

“Apple told me today that they will no longer be developing its professional photography application, Aperture,” Jim Dalrymple reports for The Loop.

“‘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,” Dalrymple reports. “‘When Photos for OS X ships next year, users will be able to migrate their existing Aperture libraries to Photos for OS.'”

Dalrymple reports, “Apple was very clear when I spoke with them this morning that development on other pro apps like Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro is continuing. Professionals in those app categories should not worry about their apps — they will continue as normal.”

RFull article here.

MacDailyNews Note: The lastest version, Aperture 3.5.1, was released November 14, 2013.

R.I.P., Aperture.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “wirehead” for the heads up.]

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167 Comments

  1. For a year now, I have been waiting for Apple to bring an update to Aperture before acquiring the software for me and my associates. This was the result of our having lost interest in using Lightroom which has always been unpleasant to use compared to Aperture.
    The unwise decision of Apple to terminate its involvement in pro software is now making us review our hardware options. Sadly it is also the writing on the wall that Apple may be on a course that will invite corporate implosion sooner than than we would have thought possible.

    1. Looking for cues at Apple acquisitions lately, Beats and wearable tech execs, it won’t be long until the next keynote is a fashion runway on Broadway.

      The pros visual pros built Apple and sustained them through the hard times. And more and more Apple is turning their back on them.

  2. Perhaps a few of the Aperture engineers sitting in the new iHole building will be tasked to fix the email IMAP problem, now broken for 8 months. Or perhaps Tim Cook will simply discontinue Mail as well to make room for an iThermostat.

  3. Apple is really starting to piss me off.
    Another in a long line of “look at me, use me, spend your hard earned on me, I’m the best and I’ll look after you from here on in” until they loose interest and just walk away, abandon their user base and pretend nothing has happened.
    Just like the new iCloud where you can store any file you want. We’ve been here before, it was called iDisk and then they canned it, forced you to pull all the data back to your desktop and now they’re trying to convince me to put it all back again. Well Apple, I’m not falling for that one AGAIN.
    Pricks.

    1. You bring up a really good point. Now that I’m going to have to migrate to Lightroom, I’m not needing to subscribe to as large of an iCloud plan to begin with. I should have gone to Lightroom from the beginning since Aperture wasn’t core to Apple’s business. Likewise, Final Cut Pro isn’t, nor is Logic.

      Dropbox is core to Dropbox’s business. I’m not sure why I should trust iDisk iCloud.

        1. Well, Aperture is was pretty central to how Apple achieves the Unified experience between iOS and OS X devices… for photos as far as pros were concerned.

          Do I really want to migrate hundreds of Gigabytes at some point because Apple doesn’t feel like doing iCloud anymore, or radically changes it for the umpteenth time?

  4. We the faithful masses waited for apple to make us proud. Instead, they bent us over and rammed it in dry. Why didn’t I listen to the adobe fanboys years ago and switch to Lightroom?

  5. Well, this is so frustrating! I put my faith into mac products and I am forced to invest much time and effort to migrate to another product. I seriously question if my migration to Keynote and Pages was a wise long term investment. In fact, I may just stop using those products right now and follow the masses….I feel really let down Apple!

    1. 2nd part of your sentence—issuing an early heads-up whilst maintaining plausible deniability, kind of a CS move. 1st part, addressed by GoeB.

      Although I do not work with such media pro apps, I can understand the sour taste, the displacement, the dollar signs with wings, the aloof betrayal. Wrenching change like that, in almost any walk of life, sucks.

  6. For those of you suggesting that Aperture users can just keep on using the software forever, consider this;

    When Pages was “upgraded” last October, the same voices told us the same thing. True, Pages 5.0 could not do something as basic as laying out a newsletter with two stories on the front page with text that flowed to subsequent pages, but (we were told) that didn’t matter because we could keep on using Pages 4 forever. For example, we could still use the media browser to place images from our iPhoto or Aperture library.

    Well, those libraries will disappear on any Mac that upgrades to Photos on Yosemite. So will any ability to use iCloud to back up or share the old-style libraries. There may be additional issues with files, screen images, or printing from Pages 4 on Yosemite. All those systems are being updated, too. “Forever” lasted all of a year.

    Yes, we can pass up Yosemite and any subsequent OS updates. That means we can’t use new software or buy new Macs.

    Alternatively, we can accept that the use of Pages for laying out documents that need more than TextEdit but less than InDesign is dead… Despite all the assurances to the contrary last fall. Anyone who listened to those assurances has another year’s worth of documents in a dead-end file format. Anybody who sticks with Aperture will just be stacking up more images that will eventually need to be moved to Lightroom or the like.

  7. This sucks. I have avoided Adobe products like the plague for years – THEY ARE TRUELY TERRIBLE, over complicated, gastly expensive and just plain awful.

    I will continue to use Aperture until it finally doesn’t work due to neglect. Then likely have to go with whatever 5th grade equivalent that Apple has as a photo manager at the time or… or what? My choice will be to pay a kings ransom for crap software from Adobe or… probably nothing.

    Seriously makes me yearn for the days of film. The dark room was less complicated than Adobe’s craptastic software.

  8. And when was the latest version of the MDN app released? Still no swipe to return to the main story list. Your “takes” mean nothing until you bring your app into the current navigation realm.

  9. Don’t panic, guys.

    Photos is the result of Apple essentially merging the iPhoto and Aperture teams, taking advantage of all they’ve learned since those apps started, together with Apple’s upcoming graphics technologies like Metal, and writing a new app.

    Note in particular, that Photos WILL import your existing Aperture and iPhoto libraries. You won’t lose any data, and Photos will be a substantially better performing program.

    -jcr

    1. Obviously, the images themselves will transfer over, but what about the metadata? Apple could quiet all this furor by assuring Aperture users that they can move to Photos without losing the organization of their libraries, their original RAW and final JPG images with the transform history, and all the other metadata that Aperture stores but iPhoto doesn’t. They could say, at least in general terms, what can be saved and what can’t.

      There are people out there who feed their families using Aperture who have watched what happened to people that organized their workflow around Final Cut or the old iWork. They know they have a lot of decisions to make and work to do, but Apple hasn’t provided enough information to make informed decisions. No wonder the photographers are upset.

  10. I felt like you are all feeling when iWeb was shut down. I shall reserve judgement on apple until Photos is released. Maybe they are rationalising everything so it works on ios and osx and are building everything from the ground up again (like pages etc).

    It may be they believe there is going to be no future for professionals in all media and amateurs will rule all? We will all self publish everything and somehow that will supplant tradition? I don’t agree with that but it does make you wonder…

    1. Interesting. Of all the comments I have read on this on a half-dozen websites, yours is the first to point out the iOS connection. Unlike Aperture, the new Photos will be a dual-platform app like the new iWork. That has consequences.

      iWork was rewritten last year so that both Macs and mobile devices would have nearly identical feature sets and a common file format, with a preference for iCloud rather than local storage. Features that could not be readily implemented on an iPhone (like linked text boxes in Pages) were simply dropped. That makes it possible for somebody to be editing a file on his iPad and hand off the project to his Mac whenever he chooses without having to worry about losing any data.

      Similarly, Photos will be on both our Macs and our iDevices. We will have the same images and metadata available on both, with the same toolbox for working with them. We will be able to freely move back and forth between the two platforms in Photos without missing a beat. The millions of people who take pictures on their iPhone or iPad will love it, as will most amateur and not a few prosumers who use actual cameras. This may well sell Macs to people who currently own a Windows machine.

      The cost for that is that both platforms will need to use common file formats designed for easy use on iCloud, and that neither the iOS nor the OSX program can make any changes to a file that cannot be reproduced on the other platform… just like the new iWork. The new program will–indeed, it must–drop any features in the existing OSX iPhoto or Aperture, or in the existing iOS iPhoto or Photos, that cannot be implemented on both platforms.

      So, someone using the new Photos on their brand new 4.7-inch iPhone will not have access to any feature of the program that is not equally available to a photo professional managing terabyte-sized image libraries on a 12-core Mac Pro attached to dual 27-inch 4k monitors. That cuts both ways, of course. Perhaps Apple can find a way to satisfy the professional, but I have my doubts.

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