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Aperture Will Cease To Be Developed

Sadly, Apple announced on June 27th, 2014 that it was no longer going to develop Aperture. It is indeed a sad announcement and one that was upsetting in many ways. Aperture has been my platform of choice for over seven years, for all my image processing, organising and archiving. Even my video and audio work go through Aperture. The news even resulted in a  sleepless night; I must have woken up five times and every time I awoke, I was thinking about how my workflow is going to cope with the loss of my favourite software.

A screenshot of Aperture v3.5.1. Photos © Edmond Terakopian /2014

The announcement from Apple:

“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,” Apple said. “When Photos for OS X ships next year, users will be able to migrate their existing Aperture libraries to Photos for OS X.”

The Future For Aperture Users

The good news is that there’s no need to panic and take immediate action. When Yosemite, the next version of Apple’s OS X is released this coming autumn, I’ve been told that Aperture will be updated to work with it. Also, as the raw updates are OS based, all new raw updates will work within Aperture. What this means is that after launch, Aperture will carry on functioning fully for a 12-18 month period. So no need to panic and take drastic action. The new Photos App is set to release early 2015.

Apple’s new Photos App for OS X Yosemite. Photo: Apple

Apple and Adobe are working together to come up with a way to help Aperture users who wish to move over to Lightroom, the logical choice, to migrate their libraries of images over. However, the biggest problem and one which seems insolvable (at least for now) is that Aperture adjustments won’t translate into Lightroom adjustments. Hopefully all metadata, library structure, versions of files and naturally all the raws will come across ok.

Another upgrade path for those Aperture users who aren’t professional or advanced enthusiasts, is Apple’s own forthcoming Photos App. Certainly the first version of the App seems to be very much consumer. However as Apple updated and upgraded FCP X, maybe Apple will do the same with Photos and it will on later releases have Aperture’s functionality? This is pure speculation and hope on my part.

Personally, my course of action is going to be waiting to see what and how the migration tool(s) will work. I have an Aperture archive of well over half a million images, spanning decades of work, so any decision I make cannot be done lightly and without research. Apart from migrating my libraries of work, I also have to update all of my onsite and offsite backups to work with whatever my new system will be. It’s highly likely to be Lightroom, but it does all depend on how things pan out. It’s worth keeping hold of your Aperture libraries for now, just to see how the Photos App develops; who knows, perhaps future versions will be of professional spec?

I’ll also be writing to Apple to explain why I think dropping Aperture is a bad idea and hope they may reconsider; I would urge others to do so too. You can feedback via this LINK.

Lastly, please share this article to help Aperture users from realising there’s no need to panic and there is time to plan a perfect strategy for each user’s needs.

Further Reading

Aperture Expert

DSLR bodies