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Comment by alextsayun | Hacker News Reader

They will soon add Photomator app to Apple Creator Studio. They have bought Pixelmator team last year and since Pixelmator is already in this bundle, I think the next app will be Photomator, a pretty close replacement for Aperture.

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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.

Exactly! There are plenty of photo editors that could replace Aperture (and LR if you'd like), but DAM always seems to be the missing piece.

I'm using Photos DAM after leaving LR which I was forced to when Aperture went away.

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).

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.

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