For my use, it was fine at release, it got better through time. The unpacking of library and transition to iPhoto compatible library was rocky.
Definitely a tool where you wanted the x.x.2 before you’d update a major or minor version, because, well, it probably held 150,000 photos at a time where almost nothing else you did on your personal computer had that amount of data or irreplaceable value per file.
--- Aperture science ---
Many prolific shooters considered this the best photojournalism / travel / wedding / EDL bulk photo library and photo triage tool outside of the camera bag, bar none. Still is if you have kept a Mac tuned for it.
The key benefits for me, not found most other places at the time, were:
- auto photo sorting (“stacks” of burst photos you could expand and choose the best from then collapse again, like burst works on iphone now), along with press compliant metadata and tagging, GPS, TZ adjust, etc.
- ultra fast photo triage (rapid star ratings and ability to see photos above n stars for fast pruning of a 3000 photo shoot to the best 30 shots), and
- a (just okay) RAW engine with non-destructive photo editing, as well as masters and ‘versions’ per photo including automatic RAW+JPEG pairing for digital cameras
All this on a love-it-or-hate-it “managed” library, where you could go look at the originals in folders, but never needed to if you let go of folders and thought in metadata sets. (It could also oversee folders external to the library.)
I switched to it from Lightroom, occasionally tried to switch back, always felt like molasses compared to the ‘just right’ benefits of Aperture if you shot a lot of photos to get a small set of publishable shots, but also wanted to keep every shot forever.
--- Photos 2.0 ---
There’s been a dark few years here where the Photos library that was capable of Aperture sized content didn’t offer any of those key benefits in the Photos app, but at least remained accessible across all your devices. While Photos continued to do the RAW+JPEG pairing, it lost most other things.
Latest Photos finally puts back in some of the level of photo editing that was in the original Aperture.
That said, seems though when implemented through Photos on iCloud, there’s a soft performance limit in the 130K to 160K range that things start to act wonky, one photo out of 100K won’t sync, etc.
Be interesting to see what would happen if Apple threw some QA at the high volume uses cases again.