Last week an Apple spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company would be discontinuing the development of Aperture, Apple’s pro-level photo editing and management application, in favor of the new Photos app that will be released later this year;
“With the introduction of the new Photos app and iCloud Photo Library, enabling you to safely store all of your photos in iCloud and access them from anywhere, there will be no new development of Aperture. When Photos for OS X ships next year, users will be able to migrate their existing Aperture libraries to Photos for OS X.”
Beyond a brief preview at WWDC, Apple has yet to offer many details about the new Photos application.
Apple says it plans to provide compatibility updates to Aperture that allow it to run on OS X Yosemite, but will not add any new features. Aperture has been languishing for some time, with its last update (3.5.1) in Novenber 2013.
Adobe wasted no time responding to Apple’s announcement;
“Put simply we’re doubling down on our investments in Lightroom and the new Creative Cloud Photography plan and you can expect to see a rich roadmap of rapid innovation for desktop, web and device workflows in the coming weeks, months and years. We also continue to invest actively on the iOS and OSX platforms, and are committed to helping interested iPhoto and Aperture customers migrate to our rich solution across desktop, device and web workflows.”
Apple is reportedly planning to assist pro users with the transition from Aperture to Adobe’s Lightroom, but there is no information on what this assistance will entail, or if Adobe will be directly involved. There is always the possibility that Adobe will offer incentives to encourage users to migrate, so it may be a good idea to keep an eye on this for a while before jumping over to Lightroom. Currently, you can buy Lightroom as an independent app for $79, or subscribe to one of their Creative Cloud plans.
Jason O’Grady over at ZDNet talks about this further including his own experiences with Aperture and what he plans to do in the future. Check it out.