Juan Monroy

Since I became more serious about photography in 2010, I have been using Aperture to edit and manage my photo library. While most every other DSLR photographer I’ve ever met prefers Adobe’s Lightroom or Capture One, a small niche of photographers have stuck with Aperture. I preferred it to Lightroom partly because I bought it for about $60, thanks to a substantial academic discount, and because I have had some problems with Adobe software in the past that I would like to avoid in the future.

Earlier today, the small niche of Aperture users learned that Apple will stop development of Aperture and migrate us to their new Photos app, due in 2015.

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,” said Apple in a statement provided to The Loop. “When Photos for OS X ships next year, users will be able to migrate their existing Aperture libraries to Photos for OS.

That explains why Apple hasn’t updated Aperture since November 2013 and why it still bears the antiquated Aqua look on its buttons and dialog boxes. Adobe has already began courting Aperture users promising that will double-down on its development of Lightroom. And Capture One’s pricing doesn’t look half bad should the new Photos app not do it for me.