I can’t get Raw photos to even show up… to try to import them.  

Unfortunately there are no suitable alternatives to Aperture at the moment, as your own comments have confirmed. You, an expert on the topic with an admittedly large amount of time on your hands, have come up with dead ends and are currently relying on an unsatisfactory mix of three different applications, which in tandem still fail to adequately replace Aperture.

Most comments on this topic point people to Lightroom. You seem to agree with my impression of Lightroom (and all other Adobe products) as buggy, poorly designed, unintuitive, and slow. You also seem to confirm that Lightroom, despite comments to the contrary, does not fully substitute Aperture’s functionality, even poorly.

I have no experience with the other products you mentioned, but it sounds like they are at best a band-aid approach requiring multiple applications that together yield a half-assed solution, and even then only after a considerable amount of effort. 

For me photography is a hobby and a passion - one that I’ve had since I was in high school. The moment that hobby turns into a grueling, non-paying job is the moment it ceases to be a hobby or even an interest for that matter.

I’m a big fan of Apple and generally support their business strategies and practices but what they’ve done to Aperture, and more importantly to Aperture users, is a travesty. People trusted Apple and invested significant amounts of time and effort to create image management/editing workflows revolving around the product. To abandon all these people while there are no suitable alternatives on the market is unforgivable.

This also speaks to the broader issue of Apple’s repeated failures to properly develop and manage cloud-based solutions. The discussion forums are replete with horror stories of data loss and corruption with both Apple’s cloud-based photos solution as well as their more recent cloud-based music solution. While Apple still makes beautiful hardware, the quality of their software has plummeted considerably. More importantly, they have yet to demonstrate any competency in cloud services, which paints a dire image considering they’re encouraging everyone to entrust their data to the cloud.

Part of me admires your stoic pragmatism in nonchalantly “moving on”. But another part of me resents your dismissive tone towards frustrated Aperture users who aren’t as glib about this transition.

Sorry, I’ve already moved on. Lightroom for DAM and some edits, C1 Sessions for XTrans edits. Apple is doing what they believe is the right execution of their business model. Time to move on.

I’ve wondered the same myself. It makes a lot of sense and with the filters built into the OS, would be fairly simple to improve the editing side. On the catalog side, they could strip out all the connectivity stuff and simplify support in an area that Apple changes constantly and was never particularly reliable, assuming limited Open Source resources. Then fix what is a somewhat flaky data base, at least with referenced which is what I used.

I’ve also thought perhaps they intend 3rd party developers to turn Photos into Aperture. But it seems with the developers have decided to introduce their own apps. Some interesting apps have recently been introduced, Emulsion, Mylio, Affinity. But they are lacking in many areas: keywording, local adjustments, dependent on xml files, etc.

Here’s my experience which might be of some use to those still using Aperture: I started looking for a replacement for Aperture about a year ago. Have been running Aperture, Lightroom and C1 in tandem now for a year. For me, the only choice was the wrong choice, Lightroom. I don’t like the interface. The code leaves a lot to be desired. But for anyone that depends heavily on DAM, it’s one of the very few choices in town.

I also spent some time with a database approach, Photo Supreme. OK app but unless a database is designed to work with a specific editor, there are shortcomings. I chose to use C1 Sessions with Photo Supreme. Good, not great, where it wasn’t great it was all a function of C1 not adhering to standard industry metadata practice and C1’s ongoing challenges with importing JPEG and tif files it can read and exporting tif files other apps can read. Not to mention no matter how pristine I got my Aperture library, it just was not going to import into C1 without a lot of missing images or images it could not read. Unfortunately, C1 provides no filtering tools, beyond a list of files that did not transfer (nothing on what it can’t read other than looking for an icon on the thumbnails) so sorting out the library was not in the cards. And no idea how many files it could not read as I wasn’t going to go through 30,000 thumbs and count icons.

Neither C1 nor Lightroom run near as fast as Aperture on the catalog side. The develop side varies. Overall, the Aperture GUI can’t be matched by either.

C1 has a really fine develop side. For both Nikon and Fuji I find the conversions excellent. Better than Apple or Adobe. Edit all you want, they are still better right at default. Nomenclature is similar to Mac so I found it a quick pickup. The catalog has improved from v7 but that’s not really saying much. It’s lacking in both features and performance. For those that are not catalog dependent, the Sessions mode is gorgeous. But that means Aperture users needs to consider abandoning a library/catalog.

Lightroom is Lightroom. Stable, does little wrong. For high production needs it’s great. For me, as an amateur with plenty of time on my hands, I don’t need its strongest point. I have also been through many of the complaints that dot the Adobe forums. It’s classic Adobe, every OSX update breaks something (my Dell monitor’s desktop layout now gets screwed up after my Mac wakes from sleep under 10.10.3, 10.10.2 is fine - expect it never to get addressed.)

I’m now on Lightroom and using C1 Sessions for my XTrans files. It’s a safe place to be. In the meantime I’m keeping an eye on some of the new apps and continue to ask myself if I really need a database approach beyond the Finder and an image browser.

The good news is Lightroom sucked in all of my metadata and images just fine. The import plug-in worked like a champ.

The bad news is you might be better off just wiping your disk and doing a fresh install. I’ve on and off used Lightroom for 9 years. It can get picky and it can have issues when Apple releases updates. Currently I have 2 issues: the sleep issue I noted above and an inability to select some thumbs with the mouse. Need to use the arrow keys or restart Lightroom. Both issues are well documented in Adobe’s forums. I can live with them.

Would suggest doing a good amount of housekeeping in Aperture before you move and understand what Lightroom will do with adjusted Aperture images. With the latter, it creates jpegs and places them in a unique folder. Which means all of those images will not be where the masters reside. I took all of my 3 to 5 star rated Aperture raws and saved a tif version to the appropriate folders. A lot less work than putting the jpegs back into their appropriate folders.

After you’re done with the import, just let Lightroom run. It took me 2 days for it to build its 2880 previews on a 3.0 i7 rMBP. I only built previews for 2,100 images. Those were Fuji XTrans intensive which Adobe struggles with. Don’t expect a quick build like you get with Aperture. You’ll see this with your normal imports as well. Hope you like coffee breaks.

Once you’re there is solid and a safe place to be. Library is referenced so easy to move again is the way I looked at it. I wasn’t willing to just wrap my Aperture library into a managed library and continue to rely on it. At some point, it’s not going to run.

The good news is Lightroom sucked in all of my metadata and images just fine. The import plug-in worked like a champ. The bad news is you might be better off just wiping your disk and doing a fresh install. I’ve on and off used Lightroom for 9 years. It can get picky and it can have issues when Apple releases updates. Currently I have 2 issues: the sleep issue I noted above and an inability to select some thumbs with the mouse. Need to use the arrow keys or restart Lightroom. Both issues are well documented in Adobe’s forums. I can live with them. Would suggest doing a good amount of housekeeping in Aperture before you move and understand what Lightroom will do with adjusted Aperture images. With the latter, it creates jpegs and places them in a unique folder. Which means all of those images will not be where the masters reside. I took all of my 3 to 5 star rated Aperture raws and saved a tif version to the appropriate folders. A lot less work than putting the jpegs back into their appropriate folders. After you’re done with the import, just let Lightroom run. It took me 2 days for it to build its 2880 previews on a 3.0 i7 rMBP. I only built previews for 2,100 images. Those were Fuji XTrans intensive which Adobe struggles with. Don’t expect a quick build like you get with Aperture. You’ll see this with your normal imports as well. Hope you like coffee breaks. Once you’re there is solid and a safe place to be. Library is referenced so easy to move again is the way I looked at it. I wasn’t willing to just wrap my Aperture library into a managed library and continue to rely on it. At some point, it’s not going to run.

Hello Henrik,

thanks for your update, indeed Aperture runs fine on beta 3.

A great relief because none of the other programs like lightroom and capture has the options I like on aperture. File locking, version names, direct photo editing and apple script… 

Today I tested Aperture on 10.11 beta 3, imported 250 Canon 1Dx raw files. Made a selection, did the cropping, corrections and META-data then run a apple script to batch process the images to two folders. The script also combines the META-data in a different order (in the caption it puts the info from the headline, IPTC scene etc.) before Aperture export the image. Each folder has his own export setting, and everything works fine. A repeated this workaround a few times and no crashing of Aperture. Next test will be on the field during a soccer match…

When Photos was first announced I had hopes that it could grow into an Aperture replacement through continued enhancements combined with third party extensions. However, everything I’ve seen suggests a fundamentally different image management foundation that is hostile to users who want to preserve the project/folder/album hierarchy they’ve built in Aperture.

I love the concept of having my images backed up in the cloud and accessible from every device. I also like the option of viewing images organized and grouped algorithmically by location and date. However, I am not about to abandon years of meticulous library organization to this dumbed down approach.

Photos’ failure to import my Aperture library with its organization intact was an immediate showstopper for me.

Have you tried printing?  Big problems here.

Reply to Frans: Disable onscreen proofing (from the View dropdown menu). This fixed the problem for me. 

“PS, I’ve tried C1 & LR but can’t stand the GUI’s.”

This can’t be overstated. I hate using Adobe software so much that switching over from Aperture would feel like switching from OS X to Windows 8.

I cannot print *correctly* in Yosemite or El Capitan.  There is a colorsync/profile problem where colours are being incorrectly printed.  It results in under-saturated files with banding in smooth gradients.

I haven’t printed for many months, but have needed to recently which is when I discovered the problems.  The good news, is that Pages can now print as well as Aperture used to (although you can’t choose intent) and it’s the simplest page layout app there is.  I’m printing to a z3100 on 24” roll and I can even centre the images with little effort!