Well, after all my problems with Aperture’s book printing, Apple has now announced that Aperture is being end-of-lifed. This brings with it conflicting emotions.
Aperture was developed in a time when the general Mac OS was somewhat more primitive than it is now. The capabilities demonstrated in the WWDC 2014 videos show that quite a lot of Aperture’s abilities have been migrated into the OS as a whole, and Aperture is to be replaced with a (lighter weight) iCloud-focussed Photos app. One of the themes of WWDC has been that applications are now highly plugin-able. One of Aperture’s great weaknesses was that third party filters and effects weren’t non-destructive. So if you wanted to apply a border to a photo, it had to be flattened into a TIFF file (an extra 100+mb for a whole image vs an insignificant addition of metadata to the original RAW file), and the border applied to it – negating the purpose of shooting in RAW.
The non-destructive plugin-oriented paradigm Apple unveiled at WWDC leaves me hopeful that even if Photos is a stripped down product from Apple, whatever is lost will be able to be replaced by third party plugins, which won’t require this stupid flatten-to-tiff workflow we have currently.
My biggest fear, is that the manual management facility – the ability to arbitrarily arrange projects with folders, subfolders etc will be lost. It’s a feature Aperture has, but which iPhoto does not, even when they share the same library. Tethering and fine-grained output options could potentially be replaced by third party plugins, but the representation of the library itself – the core functionality of the app is different between Apple’s two current photography apps, I would be surprised if that could be altered.
Right now, Aperture is a little under $90. If Photos is free, and the abilities of Aperture today can be aded as plugins for less than that, it could end up being a net win. If not, there’s app packages from Corel, DXO, and even Adobe if you’re a masochist.