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Comment by davidthewatson | Hacker News Reader

There should be an ACM award for retro-computing like this. I miss Aperture so much that it's difficult to express.

I dislike photo editing deeply, but for some reason, the Aperture design just made sense to me, being a person who could never grok photoshop.

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I don't dislike photo editing necessarily but I miss Aperture.

I've never been in to photo editing and whatnot but when Aperture came out I decided to spend time learning it, organizing my library, tagging things and figuring all that stuff out.

I invested a lot of time and even bought some ebooks and whatnot to learn it better.

Then the EOL'd it and I just have never recovered. I have to sit down and spend time learning Lightroom, redoing all my libary and reworking my storage.... and I just have never had the desire to do it. Many of my photos are sitting in an old Aperture library tar'd up on my NAS.

Have a look at RAW Power from Gentleman Coders. It's the closest thing I've found to Aperture. https://www.gentlemencoders.com

I’m curious how it performs on modern hardware. When it was new (1.0) it was dog slow on the fastest tower Apple sold. I bet it’s very usable now by comparison.

I used it as long as possible with Retroactive till maybe about a year ago on an iMac with an external SSD drive. I was actively trying to fight the Adobe tax. It was fine for quite a while, but in the end, it just got too buggy. Each macOS release seemed to slow it down more, and very often, thumbnails would not render. It doesn't help that Retroactive itself doesn't seem to be actively maintained.

I’m curious if you tried Lightroom.

The one thing that really put off of Aperture were the destructive edits, so in that regard Lightroom was a much better fit for me. Unfortunately while the app has been 64-bit for a while Adobe never sold a perpetually licensed version with a 64-bit installer, so I've stuck with macos 10.14. I'll be damned if I'm going to rent software from Adobe.

There are alternatives to Lightroom that have perpetual licenses, like DxO Photo Lab and Capture One.

As a hobby APS-C photographer who bought DxO PhotoLab yesterday, I feel obliged to say that unless you actually make money from photography, you WILL shed a tear when paying for either.

$229?[0] I don’t find that to be excessive. You gotta hit four digit to get my tear ducts to engage.

[0] https://shop.dxo.com/en/dxo-photolab7-elite.html

Yeah $229 is about $229 too much for something that comes bundled with a rootkit (nee Pace Interlok). Lightroom was about $140 ($80 for an upgrade) with no DRM, and pretty slick asset management.

Is that still true? I only found some very old forum posts, but nothing about the newer versions.

https://www.dxo.com/eula/

  For security reasons, DxO integrates DRM (“Digital Rights Management”)
  software components in the Software.

Don't know if it's still Pace Interlok, don't care.

I’m in a lower cost of living European country, a lot of people use $200 phones here. $230 for “some photo editing software” made even my fiancée raise her eyebrows, and she’s used to seeing me pay a lot for computer stuff.

DxO came bundled with that rootkit disguised as DRM. No idea if they still do, but I've not bothered with them since. The C1 workflow never reall gelled with me, but really neither do the asset management thing that Lightroom does so well (although to some extent Aperture came close).

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