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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> any reason these old tools can't be used nowadays

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.

New cameras produce raw files that are not backwards compatible with older raw file formats. These raw files are key to the highest quality and flexibility in editing.

Would a file converter not solve this issue? Or do the new formats embed extra kinds of data (extra channels, etc) that are just impossible to represent in the old formats?

There are file converters. At least one big name company - probably Adobe - offered a free tool. I stopped using Adobe after LR went subscription, so can't remember the specifics.

You can still use Adobe DNG Converter. I use it to convert new raw files for Lightroom 4.

That's the one, thanks. I have a Mac mini just for Aperture and LR5, will see if this can revive that system.

Problem is that the latest macs are just so fast that it makes it hard to switch back.

Me too. Mini has gone from main dev machine, to backup, to kids, and now to Lightroom. It wasn't a slouch BITD, 6 core and 32G ram. It's a bit slow now, but not that bad even on the 4k screen. But it's the best thing I have that runs 32 bit MacOs.

In theory, although camera raw formats tend to be more or less undocumented/proprietary, and the people with the resources to create tools that support them tend to be commercial enterprises (mainly Adobe and few minor ones) that are interested in getting you to use their latest thing (not going to work on your decade-old macOS, sorry).

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.

Aperture doesn't run on newer MacOS systems.

I keep and old Mac laptop with an old OS just to run Aperture so that I can access my archives.

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