Apple cancels Aperture

[libarata]

You have iMove and iPhoto. Both are very good programs. See how they work for you. Congratulations on the new Mac!

Cool, thanks! I can't wait to put those apple stickers on my Forester and be all trendy like everyone else!

I am quite the ultimate newb in these things, so ya'll can expect some edits that will make you cringe!

 

[grogie]

We have 750,000+ images in Aperture. The migration to lightroom and photoshop is an unfortunately daunting task, but necessary. There are some really nice features in lightroom now, including app access to the library. It is time.

Now that's a library! :Wow1:

As I stated earlier, I have purchased LR (Amazon sells it rather then to rent it from Adobe). I played around with LR some, but boy, even switching my much smaller library to LR is daunting. I may still see what Apple does?

 

[robgendreau]

DiploStrat, I have never tried dissassembling the LR catalog to find the entries in the database. But you don't have to: the RAW adjustments are right here in the XMP sidecars. Any text editor can read them. There's a syntax, but it's like "crs:ColorNoiseReduction="25"" for example. I guess XMP is proprietary, but there are a bunch of partners in it, although most are enterprise level and above our pay grade. And of course the edit data stored there is meaningless with an Adobe product to read it, since that "25" is meaningless to Aperture, just as the info stored by Aperture is in the apversion files (in XML I think).

And even some non-Adobe products can read the XMPs (but not make any sense of the edits). GraphicConverter for example reads the sidecars so I can see what keywords my RAWs have.

And PSDs are proprietary, but are pretty much a standard. Lots of applications can read them, and you can embed RAW in those. And use of adjustment layers and so on. But again I think that the editing specific stuff only works with Adobe products, although you can often make those edits somewhat more transportable by say having changes on one layer you could delete. Just speculating on that since we use all Adobe stuff for that pretty much.

If Apple follows through and makes for example a system-wide white balance tool for Photos that's gonna be a benefit for all Mac users, of course. Might be like just setting a pantone color or something standard, so that just a value representing it could be passed around. But of course you also have the problem of rendering a usuable image from a RAW, and that varies all over. So you could be starting with something different in each instance.

 

[DiploStrat]

I think it's a bit harsh to criticize people who are now switching to LR as panicking. After all many switched before that, or chose LR over Aperture from the start. And many might consider it more "powerful," depending of course on how you define it. YMMV, but folks have been arguing about that for years. And of course there are other DAMS as well, and many photographers, especially those that don't work solo, find these DAMs lacking and prefer Bridge, or Photomechanic or even multiuser server-side solutions.

Rob, if you review my posts you will see that I am not arguing against using Lightroom, only against changing "because Apple will not be updating Aperture." In fact, I acknowledged that Lightroom more widely used and, as you know from DPReview, many folk (remember Basalite?) consider it much more powerful for editing. For those who have large Aperture libraries, however, it may be worth waiting until the rest of the shoes drop, especially if you have a lot of images in your Aperture (or even iPhoto) library. My copy of Aperture, at least, has not stopped working just because Apple have announced that there will be no more development. Buying new today? Bit harder question.

I don't think the issue whether Photos is or isn't "pro" grade; the issue is that NO ONE KNOWS. They like to surprise people. Some folks don't wanna gamble with surprises. Apple could have released specs, or even marketing hype, saying it had this or that "pro" feature. But they didn't, and the burden is on them.

Again, I agree. It seems that it would have been brainlessly easy for Apple have run even the simplest campaign announcing "Photos - All the power of Apeture and even easier to use - now on ALL your devices, etc." But then I don't run Apple. And I don't know for a fact that Photos will be any good at all.

I now prefer to use Aperture with a NON-referenced library. It lags, however, with a referenced library since any change in the filesystem means you lose the connection to whatever virtual structure you have in Aperture. And if you need to move stuff in your filesystem, you cannot do it from within Aperture, as you can with LR and others. With both you can "relocate original..." but I find that far less useful than simply manipulating the filesystem folders directly.

Actually, you can simply relink referenced files; I've done it when I moved 150GB of images without thinking, but a "relocate" command from within Aperture is much safer.

But that reminds me of a tip Aperture plus LR users might find useful. Assuming a non-referenced Aperture library, you can still use LR to reference those files. Go into the Aperture library package, and make an alias of the "masters" folder, or probably better, a subfolder of what you want to see in LR (they're by date: 2014>7>14 for Bastille Day, eg). Move that alias out to say your Pictures folder. Then find the ALIAS in LR's import dialog, and import it, leaving the photos in place (ADD, not copy). Bingo, they now show in LR. And since both can work on them without changing them, no problemo. But what if you do want to move metadata back and forth? It's a royal pain on the Aperture side since you have to essentially export to do that, even with jpgs. But if you "export original" with IPTC and keep the same name and write it back to the same folder where the original is, then you can just use "synchronize folder" in LR to bring it in. In that case it will be like 1234.jpg and 1234 (1).jpg or something, or you could just add "ap" or something in the Aperture export settings. Probably not as useful as just having both Aperture and LR use referenced files, but it's an option.

Brilliant; simply brilliant! And it also confirms that Aperture master/original images are simply files in the OS.

I defer all comment on XMP as I have never used them. Suffice it to say that, as far as I know, only Aperture can read its image adjustments, only Lightroom can read its adjustments, etc. If you want universal files, you have to use JPEG or TIFF and a destructive editor.

It's kind of funny. Aperture users may be the minority, but they sure do love the program and REALLY don't want to move to Lightroom or whatever. 90% of the venom in other fora is directed at Apple for orphaning the product.

 

[robgendreau]

Yeah, I agree. I can't blame Aperture folks for being pissed. I mean would it kill them to be more open about their plans? These are often Apple evangelists they're messing with. And Aperture would have had a larger following if it hadn't gone without updates.

But still. I remember having carousels and carousels of slides. And bazillions of negs in notebooks with contact sheets. So compared to transitioning from that to digital, going from aperture to something is no big deal. Or going with no DAM; as someone noted, maybe that's the take away lesson here.

 

[Lost Canadian]

Which brings us to some other thoughts:
-- Why does everyone assume that Photos will not be "pro" grade?

Honestly, I thing it's because if history is any indicator of Apple's intentions, they have proven over the last number of years that "professional" is no longer their target or focus. Any "Pro" still using Aperture has been primarily strung along and hung out to dry while other developers have created more powerful, more flexible, and more refined tools with better output. No one likes switching, especially when they are comfortable and something has always worked for them. Aperture was and still is a good program, but it's very long in the tooth at this point, and if "photos" is to be anything like aperture with it's tools and mediocre level of refinement then it simply isn't going to cut it. In a competitive professional environment sometimes having the best tools available for the job is imperative, and as much as I hate to say it, the output from Aperture is lacking compared to the output from Capture or DXO, or even LR. Maybe it's a case of golden eye syndrome but the results do speak for themselves. A professional photographer, or even an advanced amateur does not want their software to be the weak point in their workflow. And I think it's fair to say that anyone who spends $3000 to over $20000 on just a camera body in effort to maximize their output potential is not going to let a $99 piece of software be that achilles heal, especially when clients are paying for top quality results.

Will "photos" offer great file management, coupled with powerful tools, and exceptional output,.... no one knows at this point but I believe for many, especially those that have been waiting patiently for Apple to get back into the "pro" game, this move to "photos" with no expressed intent to continue to support the professional market's needs or desires, is enough of an indicator to say that Apple's focus is elsewhere, and it's time to look at other options.

That said, I hope whatever it is Apple is doing it moves things forward and challenges certain areas of the market to make it better.

 

[Chazz Layne]

Chazz I think you have this wrong.

Aperture allows two different library storage methods 1) Managed and 2) Referenced libraries. If you use "managed" everything is stored in one large package file (this is what I think you are referring too). If you use a "referenced" library setup all the raw image files are stored just as they left your memory card in regular old file folders. These files can be accessed by any program and shared on the network. I have been using referenced libraries for years. You may have it half right, in that smart albums and keywords are stored in the aperture files and would not be accessable from outside of aperture.

Thanks Ryan, that may well be where we've gone wrong with Aperture. I'll look into the referenced option, it may well ease the issues we've been having for years with the library, as well as make the transition to Lightroom a bit easier.

Chazz,

With respect, that is a common misconception, but a misconception none the less. Aperture allows you to store your master or original images anywhere you want, inside the Aperture package (which is a form of folder) or on any local drive, even a CD-ROM. And you can mix and match as you wish. In my case, my OS and applications, including my Aperture library, reside on a 500 GB SSD. There is nowhere near enough room on that drive so most of them live on a multi TB HD. In my case, I unload my camera directly into Aperture and park the images inside the Aperture package (called "Managed") to start with as this gives me the greatest possible speed for adjusting big 50MB RAW images. That done, I "relocate" them to the HD, at which point they are referred to as "Referenced" masters in Aperturespeak. My son in law goes one step further, parking his masters on a HD connected to his Airport. Apple does not technically support this, but as his primary machine is a 500GB MacBookPro, he, like me, does not have enough room on his SSD for his enormous panoramas. And, this allows him wireless access to his masters from anywhere in the house.

Bottom line, Aperture masters (and previews and thumbs) are stored in standard, Macintosh files. In fact, each time I download a new release of Lightroom to try it out, I simply have it read the same master image files that I use for Aperture.

As a final note, I would be very surprised if Lightroom stored RAW adjustments in non proprietary files and would love to see documentation of that. Nikon can do it, by writing data back to an extension of the NEF, but I have never heard of any third party being able to do the same. (Doesn't mean that it doesn't happen, but I just don't know how you could do it.)

I know that there is guideline of no more than 10,000 images in a single project, but I have never heard of an Aperture library that was too large to open.

While Ryan's comment makes the point somewhat moot, I feel compelled to point out that a "package" file is not the same as leaving things in plain old files/folders, nor is it even close to being a "standard" Mac file (it's borderline "system file"). The Aperture packages are completely unusable (by any average user) over the network, plus the organization of the files inside the package is chaotic at best—good luck picking out single albums inside all the numbered folders. The fact that Aperture defaults to this style of proprietary database and hides away the option for a more open standard speaks volumes to Apple's master plan. By comparison, Lightroom defaults to keeping your albums/libraries stored with whatever organizational structure you've chosen to use with no special classifcations or conditions on the files—they're simply RAW/JPG stored in plain old regular folders free for use any way the end-user sees fit, with all metadata intact (even Windows of all things can see it). As a bonus, and as others have mentioned, LR stores all the basic adjustments in the XMP sidecars, which is an open standard that several programs read right out of the box.

The default "managed" libraries crash the program if they get too big (for us, that's about 13 months of photos). I can't speak to the stability of the "referenced" libraries, but it sounds like they can handle quite a bit more.

 

[Ryanmb21]

Thanks Ryan, that may well be where we've gone wrong with Aperture. I'll look into the referenced option, it may well ease the issues we've been having for years with the library, as well as make the transition to Lightroom a bit easier.



....

I highly recommend you look into the referenced option. It's easy to move from referenced to managed and vice versa. The "relocate masters" accomplishes this, you can even have aperture create the file structure for you in one swoop. There are great articles online, I found helpful ones way back when on apertureexpert. Good luck! I have all my pictures in one referenced library (RAW files) and never had a crash.

 

[robgendreau]

Yeah, and ironically the package is sorta organized by date, at least through the first few levels. And lotsa people use Aperture to reference their images...that are in the Finder in a date structure. Never understood the hide-the-ball. Be interesting to see what they do with ref/non-ref in Photos.

One other little trick I should have mentioned, although I cannot vouch for how safe it is, is to change the very format of the folder that is the Aperture library. We have said it's a package, and it is, but it actually has the file extension ".aplibarary" not ".pkg". For a quick and possibly dirty way to access it instead of using aliases, as I mentioned, delete the "aplibrary" extension. So "My Aperture Photos.aplibrary" becomes a regular folder "My Aperture Photos" with NO extension. The LR can see it and import it. When you next fire up Aperture, it will not find it, and give you dialog asking which library to open. It won't be there. But you can click "Other..." navigate to the folder "My Aperture Photos" and open it. Seems to work for me, although I have certainly not run through all Aperture functions with it, etc. It might mess with backup as well.

I once had occasion to use this as a way to import even referenced Aperture images into LR. Normally I had just selected my referenced images in Aperture and exported, then imported that folder into LR, and then used LR to move or rename the folders. But I had an old iPhoto (now Aperture) library that had both referenced and non referenced images, and they were scattered, some with same file names, etc. So I ran the consolidate command to move them all into an Aperture library as non-referenced photos, and then used LR to rearrange them. Not sure in every case it would work for folks, but it can be an option.

Also, if you've got a bazillion images maybe look at Photo Mechanic. I've been lusting on it for a while; I hope they take advantage of the Aperture demise and discount it. It's a huge fave with sports and news photographers; I don't know many hobbyists who use it. It's not a cataloger(I guess a browser, technicallyl), and it's not an editor, and it's not a RAW developer (although it has some features that kinda do that). It's mainly for super fast culling, sorting, adding metadata and moving stuff on to the next step, whether that be sending stuff or getting it to an editor like Photoshop. Where it really excels is metadata, and it makes full use of all that IPTC stuff many ignore. It can do search and replace and even has a set of tools for "code replacement" meaning you can set up variables for naming, auto generate captioning, all kinds of stuff. It makes use of Spotlight and can do sophisticated searches. I demo'd it and loved it, and kinda wished I'd been using it all along. The idea is sort of different than Aperture/LR: instead of storing all kinds of stuff in a database or application you make use of the standard metadata conventions of all photo files to organize stuff. Like tagging, it's actually way more flexible and efficient than using virtual or real folders, collections, etc. And universal. EVERYTHING can read photo metadata, even Spotlight in the Finder. I went to Aperture because I found Finder folders inadequate; this might make me go back.

 

[Chazz Layne]

Also, if you've got a bazillion images maybe look at Photo Mechanic. I've been lusting on it for a while; I hope they take advantage of the Aperture demise and discount it. It's a huge fave with sports and news photographers; I don't know many hobbyists who use it. It's not a cataloger(I guess a browser, technicallyl), and it's not an editor, and it's not a RAW developer (although it has some features that kinda do that). It's mainly for super fast culling, sorting, adding metadata and moving stuff on to the next step, whether that be sending stuff or getting it to an editor like Photoshop. Where it really excels is metadata, and it makes full use of all that IPTC stuff many ignore. It can do search and replace and even has a set of tools for "code replacement" meaning you can set up variables for naming, auto generate captioning, all kinds of stuff. It makes use of Spotlight and can do sophisticated searches. I demo'd it and loved it, and kinda wished I'd been using it all along. The idea is sort of different than Aperture/LR: instead of storing all kinds of stuff in a database or application you make use of the standard metadata conventions of all photo files to organize stuff. Like tagging, it's actually way more flexible and efficient than using virtual or real folders, collections, etc. And universal. EVERYTHING can read photo metadata, even Spotlight in the Finder. I went to Aperture because I found Finder folders inadequate; this might make me go back.

Photo Mechanic looks like a pretty good deal actually, especially for someone who does editing exclusively in Photoshop and only uses Lightroom for organization. With the price tag covering up to three computers (one user) I can't help but wonder how it would handle running across a network share.

 

[DiploStrat]

DAM'ed Browsers!

Rob,

A lot of sports shooters and newsies use PhotoMechanic because they don't catalog much and don't shoot RAW. They need to get images in fast, renamed for submission to wire services, etc., and out the door.

Lightroom or Aperture will do the same thing and once they came along, PhotoMechanic sales dropped as either of these two programs performed all the same functions, did it for RAW, and offered true cataloging, etc.

A popular set up back in the day was PhotoMechanic>Camera Manufacturer's RAW converter (in batch)>Photoshop. PhotoMechanic was better for seeing image files than either the Finder or Windows Explorer. And this was really important as you were manually tracking your RAW, the TIFF/PSD converted file, and, perhaps a JPEG or two. With Lightroom or Aperture all of this work went away. Which is, of course, why so many people use them.

And leads, of course, to the reason why some of us prefer keeping our masters in a Package - with Lightroom and Aperture your images are all virtual, a combination of the the master and your edits, displayed on the screen in real time. Only if you export a new file are they combined. So while I have an intellectual interest in knowing where my masters are on disk, I rarely access them that way, preferring to use Aperture.

Incidentally, the layout inside the Aperture package is not that complex. As you can see from the attached screen capture, they are arranged by accession date, the same system that many pros use. Indeed, one of the hardest things for many people to accept is that with Lightroom or Aperture, you no longer HAVE to arrange your images by date as the programs will do that part automatically. (My top level arrangement is continent>country>hint or title.

 

[DiploStrat]

Another Blast from the Past!

... the output from Aperture is lacking compared to the output from Capture or DXO, or even LR.

Trevor now hits one of the old religious wars, at least in the Nikon camp (don't know about Canon) - Can a Nikon shooter use anything but Capture? It is an article of faith among many Nikon shooters that only Nikon software can properly decode NEF. Many of these cats would slit their wrists before they would stoop to using Adobe Camera RAW.

This is why companies like Catapult offered a link from Aperture to Capture NX and DXO is advertising the same capability for Lightroom. The problem in both cases is that you end up with a new TIFF master image, and with a Nikon D800, that starts eating up disk space, fast. (To say nothing of losing your non-destructive workflow back to the RAW.)

So if you think Aperture users are upset, cruise over to Nikonians and watch the tears flowing now that Nikon cancelled Capture NX and replaced it with a "consumer" program, Capture NX-D. (A move possibly caused by Google's purchase of Nik, the company that always made Nikon software.)

At the end of the day, there are lots of software tools out there and no one will be able to tell which tool you chose to use; they will only be able to tell whether you used it well or not.

 

[robgendreau]

Yes, I agree. I've seen lots of people use it with LR or PS. It seems rather output driven, so probably works best for people who sort of work in sessions (like a game of football, a specific even they're hiring to document, etc). Those folks place a premium on culling what they just shot. The person who first showed it to me didn't even keep all the stuff on the SD card; he used it mostly to very very quickly select what he needed, process it a bit, and pass it on.

But it might work the same way for someone going back through archives of photos. I had a project where I had to deal with tons of scanned slides. No metadata to speak of, not even different dates except the date they were scanned. But at least they were folders by subject. Something like PM could have saved me ton of time in importing them. LR has import presets and whatnot, but you still have to wait to see the images in the import window, and I'd like to cull more of them at that point. And PM would be good for that. Or with someone else's batch of photos on NAS.

Someone here should buy it and review it :sombrero: I've been trying to see if I could find a review by a landscape or travel photographer. A use I could see us having for it in the field is the sitch where say someone else lets you take a look at their SD card or thumbdrive of pics. You wanna quickly scan to see what you want, and maybe add some metadata so you know it's there. This would do that well. And I just need encouragement to add metadata when I'm away; I get home and it's "who is that? where was I? what's its name?"

Rob

 

[DiploStrat]

Rob,

I shoot travel, my son in law (who is much better than I) shoots landscape (http://www.michaelneilodonnell.com), but neither of us have ever found a use for Photo Mechanic, preferring to use Aperture. (I don't find the import process that slow, and, when I do, I simply engage the "Quick Preview" function.) Similarly, I never rename images in my library as file names are irrelevant to me. I DO name files when I export them to send to people, but Aperture handles that nicely as part of the export process. So I find Photo Mechanic to be a bit of a cure for which there is no disease.

But, you can try Photo Mechanic for free, here: http://www.camerabits.com/try-photo-mechanic-for-free/

Let us know what you think!

 

[Lost Canadian]

Trevor now hits one of the old religious wars, at least in the Nikon camp (don't know about Canon) - Can a Nikon shooter use anything but Capture? It is an article of faith among many Nikon shooters that only Nikon software can properly decode NEF. Many of these cats would slit their wrists before they would stoop to using Adobe Camera RAW.

This is why companies like Catapult offered a link from Aperture to Capture NX and DXO is advertising the same capability for Lightroom. The problem in both cases is that you end up with a new TIFF master image, and with a Nikon D800, that starts eating up disk space, fast. (To say nothing of losing your non-destructive workflow back to the RAW.)

So if you think Aperture users are upset, cruise over to Nikonians and watch the tears flowing now that Nikon cancelled Capture NX and replaced it with a "consumer" program, Capture NX-D. (A move possibly caused by Google's purchase of Nik, the company that always made Nikon software.)

At the end of the day, there are lots of software tools out there and no one will be able to tell which tool you chose to use; they will only be able to tell whether you used it well or not.

IMO, Lightroom caught up to Capture NX for pure output quality of Nikon files when Adobe released version 2012. Version 2012 vs NX I tested myself long ago and I concluded then that there was absolutely no advantage to using NX. Resolution wise there was no difference and colour output could easily be made to match Nikon's inaccurate profiles, if I so wanted. C7 and DXO both better Lightroom or NX or Aperture for when it comes to pulling the most resolution out of a NEF, and highlight/shadow recovery is pretty amazing in C7 and DXO too. I use C7 if I want the very best picture I can possibly get out of a file. I found Aperture's colour management and what it took to create nice profiles to be clumsy compared to LR's and it drove me nuts, as did Apples slow as molasses response to camera updates. And Aperture never was that great at pulling details out of Nikon files.

But you are right, the only person who's going to know what program or camera I used is me, but if I'm the photographer creating the images, and I am, I want the program that gives me the most latitude with my files coupled with powerful tools. I use C7 primarily for my personal stuff and those special keepers, and I use LR for everything else.