Sigh. After Apple suddenly discontinued Aperture, which left users like me with huge complex photo archives hanging, I will never trust any professional software tool from Apple again. It is a disaster that I still haven't fully recovered from.
I've learned my lesson — all my archives will now be maintained by me, in file structures, with metadata in text files.
And yes, I agree with the article, Aperture was a really good piece of software, with many design decisions that seemed controversial, but were driven by many hours spent with professional photographers, looking at their workflows and listening to them. The result was very good.
I miss Aperture dearly, too. It is a monument of a time when Apple still could do Software, instead of just Services that feel restrictive and patronizing. I cannot get myself to use that shitty Photos app and am still constantly on the lookout for something to recreate the Aperture of old.
Just wanted to add that Nitro was built by Nik Bhatt, who was the Senior Director of Engineering at Apple leading the Aperture and Core Image teams. I believe he built Nitro specifically to fill the vacuum Apple left behind. Not sure how close it gets to the OG.
I still mourn the loss of Aperture. IMO the best pro software Apple ever made. Lightroom was always a distant second for RAW photo workflows, and Photos is still a far cry.
I still keep all my digital photos and film scans, except those photos that originate from a Leaf or Phase One digital back, in Aperture. (the raw format of those digital backs pretty much requires Capture One.) The machine does not visit the internet because it needs 10.14 to run and there haven't been security updates in a while.
There is sort of a correlation here:
> AI for some reason, and amongst the complaining in the comments you’ll invariably find it: “I miss Aperture.”
and:
> Apple released macOS Tahoe, which has been pretty constantly raked over the coals for poor design and broken interactions from the day it was released (and even before, if we’re honest).
Of course this may not indicate causation, but I believe that the AI hype has also in part led to a decline in quality overall. Not necessarily everywhere, but there is almost definitely some influence that degraded things. I see this all the time on youtube videos or Google search. In fact, I recently also switched to other search engines; they have issues too, but Google search consistently yields worse results nowadays, even when the search string used excludes AI and other things. The quality declined overall. (And on youtube you can not even really search for much at all, Google tends to show some unrelated crap after some time. They are deliberately trying to waste time of humans.)
Aperture is dearly missed even today.
And to make matters worse: you cannot even import Aperture libraries into Photos any more. Essentially leaving you with picking out the raw images from the package. And don’t get me started on excellent support for tethered shooting in a studio setting.
And I could go on and on.
The only thing I really missed in Aperture was first level support for Nik tools which are cool for their adaptive and non destructive masks.
I'm not a photographer so pardon my ignorance: is there any reason these old tools can't be used nowadays? Like film photography tools haven't fundamentally changed since the heyday of film, why can't digital tools be treated the same?
Maybe there is a niche business rescuing old machines & software and offering them as a packaged tool - offline, air-gapped, with modern bridges where necessary (a Rpi/etc that exposes a modern & secure fileshare on one side, and a legacy fileshare on the machine side, doing file format conversions if necessary).
Since the market for modern tools (as opposed to Liquid (gl)ass-infused ad delivery machines) no longer exists, it seems like using and taking care of legacy tools is the best we're got.
Aperture doesn't run on newer MacOS systems.
I keep and old Mac laptop with an old OS just to run Aperture so that I can access my archives.
> any reason these old tools can't be used nowadays
For Aperture specifically:
- it doesn’t run on newer machines. Sure there are workarounds (run it in a VM, use a dedicated old computer, …) but those are clunky and people want things to run smoothly within their current setups.
- it doesn’t support newer file formats (the insistence of many manufacturers to use proprietary RAW formats when there truly is no need to is its own rant-worthy rabbit hole…)
- even if people praise the UI and remember it fondly, there are a number of modern tools and conveniences one expects in photography software in 2025 that 2010 Aperture doesn’t have. Eg people care about things like AI denoising/upscaling now, support for HDR color profiles, etc.
> it seems like using and taking care of legacy tools is the best we're got
I’d vote for supporting independent developers and open source software.
New cameras produce raw files that are not backwards compatible with older raw file formats. These raw files are key to the highest quality and flexibility in editing.
Would a file converter not solve this issue? Or do the new formats embed extra kinds of data (extra channels, etc) that are just impossible to represent in the old formats?
In theory, although camera raw formats tend to be more or less undocumented/proprietary, and the people with the resources to create tools that support them tend to be commercial enterprises (mainly Adobe and few minor ones) that are interested in getting you to use their latest thing (not going to work on your decade-old macOS, sorry).
And professional photographers tend to be largely nontechnical people who aren't keen on tinkering with some conversion workflow, possibly including ImageMagick or other Linux-native tools of questionable compatibility with the file formats (and again, on decade-old macOS) going just so they can do their work.
There are file converters. At least one big name company - probably Adobe - offered a free tool. I stopped using Adobe after LR went subscription, so can't remember the specifics.
You can still use Adobe DNG Converter. I use it to convert new raw files for Lightroom 4.
Someone should vibe code a new version of Aperture
Please do go ahead and try it. Should just take an afternoon, right?
> It was powered by some of the most impressive technology around at the time, but you’d never even know it because you were too busy getting shit done.
If you're busy getting shit done you will not have time to engage with ads. That became a problem once technology switched from being a tool to an advertising delivery vehicle.
Until you have to do extra work to get them out of your way, wait for them to end, scroll more down/up and so on. They're also one more thing making UIs less deterministic which IMO is a lost art.
I went from Aperture to LR 5 to DXO and Affinity. But nothing beats Aperture.
Sigh. After Apple suddenly discontinued Aperture, which left users like me with huge complex photo archives hanging, I will never trust any professional software tool from Apple again. It is a disaster that I still haven't fully recovered from.
I've learned my lesson — all my archives will now be maintained by me, in file structures, with metadata in text files.
And yes, I agree with the article, Aperture was a really good piece of software, with many design decisions that seemed controversial, but were driven by many hours spent with professional photographers, looking at their workflows and listening to them. The result was very good.
I miss Aperture dearly, too. It is a monument of a time when Apple still could do Software, instead of just Services that feel restrictive and patronizing. I cannot get myself to use that shitty Photos app and am still constantly on the lookout for something to recreate the Aperture of old.
Nitro comes close:
https://www.gentlemencoders.com/nitro-for-macos/
Just wanted to add that Nitro was built by Nik Bhatt, who was the Senior Director of Engineering at Apple leading the Aperture and Core Image teams. I believe he built Nitro specifically to fill the vacuum Apple left behind. Not sure how close it gets to the OG.
I still mourn the loss of Aperture. IMO the best pro software Apple ever made. Lightroom was always a distant second for RAW photo workflows, and Photos is still a far cry.
I still keep all my digital photos and film scans, except those photos that originate from a Leaf or Phase One digital back, in Aperture. (the raw format of those digital backs pretty much requires Capture One.) The machine does not visit the internet because it needs 10.14 to run and there haven't been security updates in a while.
There is sort of a correlation here:
> AI for some reason, and amongst the complaining in the comments you’ll invariably find it: “I miss Aperture.”
and:
> Apple released macOS Tahoe, which has been pretty constantly raked over the coals for poor design and broken interactions from the day it was released (and even before, if we’re honest).
Of course this may not indicate causation, but I believe that the AI hype has also in part led to a decline in quality overall. Not necessarily everywhere, but there is almost definitely some influence that degraded things. I see this all the time on youtube videos or Google search. In fact, I recently also switched to other search engines; they have issues too, but Google search consistently yields worse results nowadays, even when the search string used excludes AI and other things. The quality declined overall. (And on youtube you can not even really search for much at all, Google tends to show some unrelated crap after some time. They are deliberately trying to waste time of humans.)
Aperture is dearly missed even today. And to make matters worse: you cannot even import Aperture libraries into Photos any more. Essentially leaving you with picking out the raw images from the package. And don’t get me started on excellent support for tethered shooting in a studio setting. And I could go on and on. The only thing I really missed in Aperture was first level support for Nik tools which are cool for their adaptive and non destructive masks.
I'm not a photographer so pardon my ignorance: is there any reason these old tools can't be used nowadays? Like film photography tools haven't fundamentally changed since the heyday of film, why can't digital tools be treated the same?
Maybe there is a niche business rescuing old machines & software and offering them as a packaged tool - offline, air-gapped, with modern bridges where necessary (a Rpi/etc that exposes a modern & secure fileshare on one side, and a legacy fileshare on the machine side, doing file format conversions if necessary).
Since the market for modern tools (as opposed to Liquid (gl)ass-infused ad delivery machines) no longer exists, it seems like using and taking care of legacy tools is the best we're got.
Aperture doesn't run on newer MacOS systems.
I keep and old Mac laptop with an old OS just to run Aperture so that I can access my archives.
> any reason these old tools can't be used nowadays
For Aperture specifically:
- it doesn’t run on newer machines. Sure there are workarounds (run it in a VM, use a dedicated old computer, …) but those are clunky and people want things to run smoothly within their current setups.
- it doesn’t support newer file formats (the insistence of many manufacturers to use proprietary RAW formats when there truly is no need to is its own rant-worthy rabbit hole…)
- even if people praise the UI and remember it fondly, there are a number of modern tools and conveniences one expects in photography software in 2025 that 2010 Aperture doesn’t have. Eg people care about things like AI denoising/upscaling now, support for HDR color profiles, etc.
> it seems like using and taking care of legacy tools is the best we're got
I’d vote for supporting independent developers and open source software.
New cameras produce raw files that are not backwards compatible with older raw file formats. These raw files are key to the highest quality and flexibility in editing.
Would a file converter not solve this issue? Or do the new formats embed extra kinds of data (extra channels, etc) that are just impossible to represent in the old formats?
In theory, although camera raw formats tend to be more or less undocumented/proprietary, and the people with the resources to create tools that support them tend to be commercial enterprises (mainly Adobe and few minor ones) that are interested in getting you to use their latest thing (not going to work on your decade-old macOS, sorry).
And professional photographers tend to be largely nontechnical people who aren't keen on tinkering with some conversion workflow, possibly including ImageMagick or other Linux-native tools of questionable compatibility with the file formats (and again, on decade-old macOS) going just so they can do their work.
There are file converters. At least one big name company - probably Adobe - offered a free tool. I stopped using Adobe after LR went subscription, so can't remember the specifics.
You can still use Adobe DNG Converter. I use it to convert new raw files for Lightroom 4.
Someone should vibe code a new version of Aperture
Please do go ahead and try it. Should just take an afternoon, right?
> It was powered by some of the most impressive technology around at the time, but you’d never even know it because you were too busy getting shit done.
If you're busy getting shit done you will not have time to engage with ads. That became a problem once technology switched from being a tool to an advertising delivery vehicle.
Until you have to do extra work to get them out of your way, wait for them to end, scroll more down/up and so on. They're also one more thing making UIs less deterministic which IMO is a lost art.
I went from Aperture to LR 5 to DXO and Affinity. But nothing beats Aperture.
And here I thought it’ll be about Portal.