Many kept Aperture running on a device at home—still used it for their own workflows (many passionate photographers on that team—surprise!). And in fact when it came time to discuss future Photos features there was always a contingent pushing to add back features that were lost in the transition away from Aperture.
While I was there, for example, they pushed (and got) Curves added to the editing pane. Levels had always been there but the purists missed the more laser-focused "curve" adjustments.
They wanted, did not get, the ability to "brush" a setting (the way you might dodge/burn an area of the image).
These days, who knows. Like me, perhaps the old guard have moved on…
(To clarify though, I was never the "old guard" with regard to the Photos team—had never worked on Aperture.)
Apple actually publicly promised they would be doing this when they killed it. But not much ever came of it.
I really don't need many features! I'm not a pro and while I wouldn't mind shelling out a one-time fee for good software I'm not paying a subscription for cloud storage I'm not going to use. The OSS options here are not awesome, either.
The photo editing capabilities were relatively weak (but it would integrate nicely with the editing software of your choice), but the cataloging capabilities were fantastic, and it had a lot of flexibility about how the files were stored on disk (have it organise that for you or not) and the option to store the metadata it created directly in the metadata of photo files themselves where much of it could be read by other software.
I've learned my lesson — all my archives will now be maintained by me, in file structures, with metadata in text files.
And yes, I agree with the article, Aperture was a really good piece of software, with many design decisions that seemed controversial, but were driven by many hours spent with professional photographers, looking at their workflows and listening to them. The result was very good.
The metadata in Apple Photos doesn't fully sync to iOS over a cable now. Did Apple intentionally make offline sync not work to force everyone on to iCloud? Also, even the local search inside of Apple Photos doesn't work correctly either. I thought it was hilarious when they tried add "AI" to this shitshow. Apple literally can't even make a local tag search.
Isn't it possible to put all the metadata in EXIF tags? People keep telling me to use Immich, but IDK.
Maybe there is a niche business rescuing old machines & software and offering them as a packaged tool - offline, air-gapped, with modern bridges where necessary (a Rpi/etc that exposes a modern & secure fileshare on one side, and a legacy fileshare on the machine side, doing file format conversions if necessary).
Since the market for modern tools (as opposed to Liquid (gl)ass-infused ad delivery machines) no longer exists, it seems like using and taking care of legacy tools is the best we're got.
For Aperture specifically:
- it doesn’t run on newer machines. Sure there are workarounds (run it in a VM, use a dedicated old computer, …) but those are clunky and people want things to run smoothly within their current setups.
- it doesn’t support newer file formats (the insistence of many manufacturers to use proprietary RAW formats when there truly is no need to is its own rant-worthy rabbit hole…)
- even if people praise the UI and remember it fondly, there are a number of modern tools and conveniences one expects in photography software in 2025 that 2010 Aperture doesn’t have. Eg people care about things like AI denoising/upscaling now, support for HDR color profiles, etc.
> it seems like using and taking care of legacy tools is the best we're got
I’d vote for supporting independent developers and open source software.
And professional photographers tend to be largely nontechnical people who aren't keen on tinkering with some conversion workflow, possibly including ImageMagick or other Linux-native tools of questionable compatibility with the file formats (and again, on decade-old macOS) going just so they can do their work.
Problem is that the latest macs are just so fast that it makes it hard to switch back.
I keep and old Mac laptop with an old OS just to run Aperture so that I can access my archives.
I'm using Photos DAM after leaving LR which I was forced to when Aperture went away.
My old well-curated and edited and tagged libraries are still on S3 backups. No conversion has been satisfactory.
...an ex-Arpeture user.
> AI for some reason, and amongst the complaining in the comments you’ll invariably find it: “I miss Aperture.”
and:
> Apple released macOS Tahoe, which has been pretty constantly raked over the coals for poor design and broken interactions from the day it was released (and even before, if we’re honest).
Of course this may not indicate causation, but I believe that the AI hype has also in part led to a decline in quality overall. Not necessarily everywhere, but there is almost definitely some influence that degraded things. I see this all the time on youtube videos or Google search. In fact, I recently also switched to other search engines; they have issues too, but Google search consistently yields worse results nowadays, even when the search string used excludes AI and other things. The quality declined overall. (And on youtube you can not even really search for much at all, Google tends to show some unrelated crap after some time. They are deliberately trying to waste time of humans.)
If you're busy getting shit done you will not have time to engage with ads. That became a problem once technology switched from being a tool to an advertising delivery vehicle.
Apple may not offer a photo app with advertising but the photo apps it offers are clearly inferior with less information density and less powerful features, because there is no longer incentive to offer a powerful photography tool.
In fact since a lot of software "success" is measured with "engagement" (regardless of the presence of ads), making a productive tool isn't incentivized as it would reduce engagement if the tool allows one to complete their task faster.