For those of us who have long been suffering under the tyrrany of iPhoto, Photos for Mac represents a beautiful new frontier of speedy and powerful photo-editing on the Mac. But if you’re an Aperture lover, Photos for Mac represents something more bitter: the total killing of Apple’s pro photo-editing suite in favor of a more consumer-oriented product.
If you’ve been hoping for a last minute reprieve, and for Tim Cook to step in and save Aperture, sorry, we’ve got bad news. Once Photos for Mac launches, you won’t even be able to buy Aperture on the App Store anymore.
How do we know? Apple has updated its official Aperture website, saying that the app will soon be pulled from all available retail venues.
Specifically, the warning reads:
When Photos for OS X is available this spring, Aperture will no longer be available for purchase from the Mac App Store.
In addition, the same message can be found in the app’s description on the Mac App Store.
For most of us, this probably isn’t a big deal, but I know from first hand experience there’s a die-hard Aperture faithful, who will be sad to see Apple turn its back on photography pros. Hopefully, they can find solace in the fact that the rest of us will benefit from a much better native Photos app on Mac.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
12 responses to “Apple confirms Aperture will die when Photos for Mac launches”
No big loss, really. Lightroom has stepped its game up.
How do you manage your photos. Does LR do that or do you need Bridge? (I need some kind of aperture replacement)
Yessiree, Apple’s going to come to your home and delete Aperture and all your backups of it from your computers as soon as Photos is released!!eleventy!!
Oh. Wait.
I guess I can keep using Aperture (and Lightroom and DxO…) while Photos comes up to speed over the next year or so. Just like everyone else can.
Agreed – the headline made it sound like the app would be disabled. Although I’m curious if you would still be able to see your photo stream….
Am I the only person who actually like iPhoto?
Yes. editing in iPhoto is a joke and managing large libraries is terrible.
Well I actually don’t think I’m the only person who likes it. But I realize I’m in the minority. It really does just work (at least for me).
For minor touch ups iPhoto isn’t great, but not “terrible”. If I actually want to do “serious” touch up work I use Photoshop but there are certainly cheap editors out there that can do the same.
As far as large libraries… I have multiple iPhoto libraries and some (most) contain thousands of photos. Again iPhoto seems to handle them well.
So when I see people complaining about iPhoto. I always scratch my head. Maybe I just use it differently from most people. :)
Why did you ask then?
Cause I can… duh!
Try dropping 8-10 thousand 36MP raw images in iPhoto and let me know how it sorts things out for you.
For managing your iPhone or point and shoot library of a few hundred or even a few thousand sub 10MP jpgs, then sure, iPhoto is fine. But when you start dealing with a ton of uncompressed, high res images – iPhoto is absolutely terrible.
I hear ya. The bigger the file size causes issues with just about any program.
Actually my iPhoto albums range from 5 to 20 thousand images, but they are mostly low to medium resolution and it works very well for that. I’m grateful that I don’t seem to have issues that others do when using iPhoto.
My question to you is why would you think that a free consumer app would ever handle 8 – 10 thousand RAW files gracefully?
For my RAW files, I use Aperture. (Though I never really liked Aperture.) But I’ve heard that Lightroom is very good and will probably make the switch to that.
Unfortunately, I think if you are planning on using a ton of uncompressed, high res images with another free consumer app from Apple, you might be disappointed again.
I’m very happy to continue with Aperture until Photos becomes good enough. With Adobe Flash as bad and insecure as it is, I don’t fancy putting my trust in Adobe Lightroom.