Apple Aperture, how I miss thee - is Apple still listening?

[phrehdd]

With the purchase of Pixelmator, Apple may review features of Aperture to add to Pixelmator or whatever the product will be renamed. Candidly, my wishful thinking was that Aperture be turned into freeware so 3rd party developers could work on it much like GIMP. For me, the DAM feature is what mattered the most.

 

[smirking]

For me, the DAM feature is what mattered the most.

The DAM is what I’ve missed the most and was what kept me hanging on to it for so long. Aperture’s DAM was just so amazingly performant and had just the right features.

 

[smirking]

I've been rethinking my photography publishing workflow and it's making remember another reason why Aperture was so amazing. It was that it was perfectly paired to iPhoto, which is another program I'd like to have back.

If I recall, it was a frictionless integration with iPhoto and Aperture sharing ratings and tags. I could do most of my detailed work in Aperture and then use iPhoto's library of plugins to output, transform, and publish my finished images in a variety of ways that wasn't supported directly in Aperture. That 1-2 punch created a DAM + publishing workflow that we haven't even sniffed the likes of since.

I really like my setup now, but what used to take 2 or 3 steps now takes 2 or 3 times the steps. I don't need AI to write my thoughts down for me. I just need it to make my 2024 utilities work as effortlessly as my 2014 utilities.

 

[mattspace]

I really like my setup now, but what used to take 2 or 3 steps now takes 2 or 3 times the steps. I don't need AI to write my thoughts down for me. I just need it to make my 2024 utilities work as effortlessly as my 2014 utilities.

The best consolation prize workflow I have now, is using Hazel to auto-create YYYY/MM/DD folder hierarchies when importing images to the various camera-based repositories I have on disk. It's not the single step ingestion to referenced library and DAM catalogue from Aperture, but it's working reliably, and it's not dependent on any particular DAM continuing development.

From that, you can build export folders to resync stuff back to iOS devices, etc.

But yes, in a number of ways, modern computers and operating systems from Apple simply cannot do things they used to be able to do.