A Lament for Aperture
Daniel Kennett (BasicAppleGuy):
An exception to that, however, is Apple’s Aperture. I’m still grumpy that Apple discontinued it back in 2015, and I’m not alone. Start spending time in the online photography sphere and you’ll start to notice a small but undeniable undercurrent of lament of its loss to this day. Find an article about Adobe hiking their subscription prices because they added AI for some reason, and amongst the complaining in the comments you’ll invariably find it: “I miss Aperture.”
[…]
So, I dug out the ‘ol Trashcan Mac Pro I lovingly reviewed here on this very blog over eleven years ago and fired up Aperture to document — at least partially — just why it was so special.
[…]
This sort of design is common in apps like Photos, and especially in “shoebox” apps. Every feature is in its own place, and if you want to use that feature you need to pick up your thing (in this case, a photo) and take it over to where the feature is. In this example, the journey from the map to the editor is through a separate list of images, the fullscreen viewer, then finally to the editor.
In contrast, Aperture comes to you.
[…]
In Aperture, the loupe is a little round zoomy thing you can either drag around to view a zoomed-in portion of the image it’s on top of, or attach to the mouse so you can just point at stuff to zoom in. […] Aperture’s technical brilliance is remarkable in how quiet it is.
The 2015 discontinuation of Aperture continues to break my heart for two reasons: the loss of support for a tremendous piece of software, of course, and also for what it represents. It was, for reasons Kennett writes about and plenty more, a pinnacle of software design and engineering. It felt like it was built by people who took two crafts — software and photography — very seriously.
This week’s announcement of the Creator Studio bundle included no news about the future of Photomator. However, my spidey-sense says this is a case where no news might be good news.
[…]
Perhaps the biggest omission in this first release of Apple Creator Studio is the lack of a Lightroom rival, which is exactly what Photomator is — and Aperture was. My guess is that Apple and the acquired Pixelmator team are hard at work on a new Creator Studio version of Photomator, including a version for iPad, and it just isn’t finished yet.
I doubt this would be a Pro tool like Aperture was, though.
Why not forecast that possibility by telling us what will happen with the multi-platform app Photomator? It’s the direct analog to Lightroom, making it the most obvious missing piece in Apple’s bundle. If it’s because there are no updates to announce for Photomator after over a year, then I would ask, “Why is Apple charging $30 a year for the existing version of Photomator?”
If it’s because Photomator will instead be a $30 a year freemium unlock for the Photos app, then I would ask, “What’s the Creator Studio bundle for if it doesn’t include photography? And why is Apple still charging $30 a year?”
Previously:
- Apple Creator Studio
- Does Apple Smell Blood in the Water?
- Converting from Aperture to Apple Photos
- Behind the Scenes on Apple’s Aperture Team
- Fast Software, the Best Software
- End of the Line for Aperture
Update (2026-01-26): John Gordon:
I have wanted Cook gone ever since 2013. Not so much for killing Aperture without a replacement, but for not giving Aperture users a reliable way to migrate to anything else.
See also: Hacker News.
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I switched from film to digital SLR too late to purchase Aperture, and have regretted it every time I use Lightroom. After I read this review last week, it made me regret it even more, because I hate the mix of MDI and modal interface in Lightroom. Ironically, I could probably run Aperture since I'm still using Mojave at home.
I also read the article by Chris Hynes linked at the bottom of the review, and discovered that Stan Jirman was involved in Aperture, which basically tripled my regret. Stan was one of the developers of TIFFany3, which was a fantastic image processor with actual innovation in the UI and tools, not just a crappy Photoshop derivative. I used T3 in grad school on my Pismo PowerBook and loved it.
The Hynes article notes two of the projects leads were photographers, they involved pro photographers in development, and the other developers learned cameras and photography. What a difference from today's Apple software, where you wonder if the developers have used anything beyond a web browser and iPhone. Or Lightroom, where you wonder if the developers are even sentient lifeforms.
@Adam I too was a fan of TIFFany. Its unique approach turned off many before they understood it, but it wasn't so strange as to cause me to give up, and once I grokked the approach, I loved it. (But it's been so long since I used it that all my memories are vague.)
I was a heavy Aperture user from almost day one. It basically originated this entire category of professional photo management apps, and it remains insane that Apple simply walked away from it. When Apple knifed it, Aperture was *still* extremely competitive with Lightroom. If all Apple did was optimize it for Apple Silicon and add some modern ML-powered noise reduction, Aperture of 2015 would be a viable app even in 2025.
Photomator is a pretty nice app though, and I think it's a lock to get a major update in the next year.
No photo app, not Lightroom, not Luminar, not Photomator not Capture One (where I migrated) is an Aperture replacement in the thing that Aperture was most designed to do - large photoshoot throughput.
Aperture was an app designed to make triaging and mass processing hundreds of images per shoot an easy and enjoyable workflow. The process of doing a first pass over the entire shoot to mark as yes / no, then go through the shoot to star rate, then process. The automatic creation of events based on ingestion or shooting date, face recognition, etc.
Aperture's image engine, by modern standards doesn't come close to Capture One's, but its workflow is still unmatched.
I'm always surprised to see nostalgia for Aperture considering that at the time the biggest complain from users (in blogs) was its super slowness compared to Lightroom.
@someone It’s definitely true that Aperture was super slow compared with Lightroom. And, honestly, I think Lightroom still feels slow today. I don’t exactly understand it; in both cases it seemed like the database stuff rather than the photo stuff that was unreasonably slow.
Apple blew it with Aperture. It made clear that they don’t care about professional users anymore. I have since stayed away from any “Pro” software from Apple, and I will never touch any of that ever again. That includes Apple Creator Studio.
It's something of a miracle that so many Pro apps have survived the past 10 years, given Apple's distaste for computers and the icky things they do to get in the way of your wallpaper.
In fact it was way faster than Lightroom and even left speeding master PhotoMechanic in the dust (according to https://photojoseph.com/comment/22576)
But speed was not the main reason Aperture was welcomed among working photographers. It was so close to their (our) working rhythm. It eased the way we did things. It was not linear like Lightroom.
Custom keyboard shortcuts
Light Table & Tabs for easy comparing of selections
Handling of two screens (Ligtroom´s is still a joke)
Very usable Brushes for partial editing (pen sensitive)
Use of several curve tools if you wanted to
etc.
Aperture´s problems were often related to MacOS bugs (ColorSync, handling of Spaces, RAW conversion etc).
The hurtful thing was that Aperture 4 was only months away from being released when it was axed. As reliability is what a professional needs most Apple has proven that their "Pro" addendum to some of their products has to be taken with a grain of salt.
Count me in with the people who still miss Aperture. I keep an older Mac Mini running so I can still use Aperture with my older photo libraries.
I’d love if really does Apple swing back to building for pro and semi-pro creative workflows again (like the 2TB 13” iPads and Final Cut mobile)
Photos on Mac has some weirdness that I don’t recall iPhoto having that now makes it really difficult to access photos quickly and easily (specifically: using the map then viewing photos at a location loses its place every time you navigate away from the map tab…similar to Safari’s sidebar bookmarks — very frustrating. Not a dark pattern. A quicksand or deep mud pattern. I avoid using it now because it’s so much additional unnecessary work)
I didn’t need all of Aperture’s power but even having multiple windows for the Photos app would be a huge improvement (with drag and drop between them), along with stacks.
