You know Aperture has been dead a long time when there is no one left to complain about how relatively poor its performance was, especially in its early years. There were of course some great ideas in there, especially in the UX and photo management stuff, but even on my (at the time!) awesome Dual G5 tower it was a mad resource hog. It never got anything like the love or investment Apple's other Pro apps did, with long gaps between relatively slim feature updates. I also forgot the price trajectory; v1 launched at 500 bucks, falling to just 80 by the final v3.

It's hard to lose a favorite app. You might check out RAW Power¹, which has some Aperture DNA in the form of Nik Bhatt².

Last year I left Lightroom for Photos, which is surprisingly powerful when used with 3rd-party apps and extensions³.

¹https://www.gentlemencoders.com/raw-power-for-macos ²https://www.gentlemencoders.com/about/ ³https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205245

You're salty? I bought Aperture a couple of months before they killed it!

In hindsight I probably should have contacted my credit card provider, but I guess I naively thought Apple would do the right thing. No such luck.

Can we talk about how cool Aperture was that it even implemented the use of a private API that Aperture used to dim and desat the system UI elements?

I can’t remember if it was specific to Aperture only or if it went along with other Apple “pro” apps.