Aperture is Dead. Long Live Aperture. For Now.

Aperture 3, when it came in a box

Kind of out of the blue today Apple seeming announced that Aperture development is dead and that those resources are being put to the excitingly named Photos app briefly shown at Apple's recent World Wide Developers Conference. On June 2, shortly after the keynote that didn't mention anything about Aperture, I wrote an email to Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, to see what was going on with Aperture. I'd like to think this morning he replied to me.

A couple sporadic posts back I theorized that 1 or more Apple photo applications would be going. My thought then was since Photos was new Aperture or iPhoto would get the boot, and that Aperture would be the one based on user install base. Turns out I was half right. It sounds like iPhoto is also being terminated. The Loop has the story here. So what does that mean for pros, semi pros, or photographers like me who enjoyed the top level tools offered? Can one program really fill both shoes? I find that unlikely, but I'll reserve final judgement for when I can play with it.

So what next for me? I'm not all that upset about it, really. If anything I'm kind of relieved to know for sure what is going on with Aperture and I no longer have to hope I'll hear something at every Apple event that may or may not be a clue as to Aperture's life or death. Honestly nothing changes. I said before that I'd keep using Aperture as I have been. It does what I want it to do, it won't stop working tomorrow, or even when Yosemite, the new OS X version comes out, as Apple will make compatibility updates to Aperture. I'll checkout the new Photos app and checkout Lightroom then see what happens then. A quick look at Lightroom looks like I have to get into their Creative Cloud subscription plan, which at $10 a month isn't that bad, and gets me a version of Photoshop, but I'm not yet a fan of this kind of setup. But that's something for 2015, I need to focus on picking up the camera and shooting more this year.