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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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