A Lament for Aperture

Many of the "old-timers" on the Photos team (when I was on that team for a couple of years) also missed Aperture. Very much so.

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.)

It is so disappointing; I started getting into photography over the past few years, shooting rolls of film here and there and need some basic library management tools to track my shots and add EXIF data for film stock, camera, etc. Photos.app kind of does what I need, but there's baffling decisions like all photo data being uneditable, even through APIs. You can edit EXIF data on the original image but the app's internal database is completely immutable. I have a handful of photos with inconsistent metadata I'd love to fix and the only option appears to be removing them from the library and re-adding them.

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.

Just wanted to add that Nitro was built by Nik Bhatt, who was the Senior Director of Engineering at Apple leading the Aperture and Core Image teams. I believe he built Nitro specifically to fill the vacuum Apple left behind. Not sure how close it gets to the OG.

Yeah, I was on the Photos team when Nik Bhatt left Apple to start this project/company. So I suppose you clearly have Aperture DNA there…

shame I had not heard of this till today.

I’m a big fan of their Raw Power app as well that predated Nitro.

thanks for recommending that: i had not found it and also lament Aperture's retirement for years. Subscribed monthly to Nitro just now...looks great

I'm not a photographer so pardon my ignorance: is there any reason these old tools can't be used nowadays? Like film photography tools haven't fundamentally changed since the heyday of film, why can't digital tools be treated the same?

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.

I've been having the same thought. Just move back to a file structure which is what I was doing from 1995 until 2007 before migrating to iPhoto.

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.

I think you might be right. I've been using Pixelmator (and recently Pixelmator Pro) for years now. It's a great app and has the "paint an effect" (like blur, sharpen) that Aperture had. I suspect this app, now that Apple bought it, will be where we look for Aperture-like features going forward.

Neither provides a DAM though. Photomator's asset management features are basically what Photos provides, which is far inferior to Aperture's DAM features. Many who miss Aperture aren't just lamenting the editing tools, they miss library organisation features that Photos simply doesn't offer.

It's actually good. I use it as my main photo editing app, as it's does exactly what I need, does it good and fast. So my workflow is Photo Mechanic for culling, then importing RAWs into Apple Photos (not to the gallery, just as a separate folder/album) and then it gets picked up by Photomator automatically. It's not a perfect flow (Apple does some weird conversion from RAW in the background and it takes a lot of CPU time when importing a lot of photos), but it gives me pretty much all what I need (including face recognition, ML exposure/color, quick subject/background masking, HDR photos editing, etc).

Aperture’s death coincided with my life getting less excitingly photogenic. The combination was enough to break my habit of shooting pictures altogether.

My old well-curated and edited and tagged libraries are still on S3 backups. No conversion has been satisfactory.

I switched to Capture One a couple years ago and like it - used Lightroom Classic for many years before that, and think I've tried most DAMs over the years.

Darktable. It has a hell of a learning curve, but it's one hell of a powerful raw editor with some really cool masking features. It has a reputation for being difficult to learn, but the newest release bundles a new tone mapper (AgX) that requires a whole lot less massaging than the old Filmic (and, to a lesser extent, the later Sigmoid mapper). I'm back to managing my photo libraries using plain old files and folders, and syncing them to my NAS using Syncthing. I couldn't be happier, and it doesn't cost me a dime.

Please do go ahead and try it. Should just take an afternoon, right?

This sounds like a great half-day project. Just use Gas Town and create a team of product managers, senior and junior developers, designers, and architects and have them get on it. (I recommend keeping Opus as the senior, and Sonnet as the juniors). Once you do this, you can release it and you'll be a (very financially successful) hero!

The decline has started before LLMs became a thing.

Until you have to do extra work to get them out of your way, wait for them to end, scroll more down/up and so on. They're also one more thing making UIs less deterministic which IMO is a lost art.

I’m confused at how advertising is related to the subject at hand, since Apple does not offer a photo app with advertising.