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Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

I still miss Aperture. Photos is a far cry still, many years later.

Lightroom never matched Aperture's organizational abilities for libraries with tens of thousands of RAW photos.

I’ve been waiting to see what happens with Photomator, and the fact that it’s not being included in anyway here makes me think it might not survive? Either that, or it’s gonna be heavily integrated into Photos…

I was also surprised to not see Photomator included. Wouldn’t it perfectly complement the lineup? I hadn’t thought of such a pessimistic interpretation, but now I’m worried as well …

I think Apple killed Aperture primarily because it was confusing to have iPhoto and Aperture with largely overlapping workflows. Aperture had the loupe view, and side by side comparison stuff, saved color grading tools (I think?), sure, but it wasn’t differentiated enough to justify a Pro designation. I think it makes more sense for Photomator features to be absorbed into Photos… and maybe Photos gets some new Pixelmator integrations if you have it, for quick touch ups / enhancement type things.

On the other hand, Final Cut / iMovie will exist side by side because it’s truly a basic vs Pro situation.

Not a product manager at Apple, of course, but this is what logically seems to make sense.

Uff, I sure hope you are wrong! I don’t want to use the iCloud library for photos, but have my photos available as digital files elsewhere on the ssd. Of course, your prediction makes more sense from Apple’s standpoint, unfortunately.

I do like the convenience of iCloud, but totally agree that having them safe elsewhere is necessary. I’ve been pretty bad about keeping solid, non-iCloud backups of my photos. I definitely need to be more proactive about it.

I don't think it's actually confusing to a professional at all

Not to a professional, no. But this isn’t iMovie vs Final Cut. Aperture was only slightly above where iPhoto was going in capability. They should have raised the iPhoto/Photos bar a lot more to get back to where Aperture was, though.

I mean, the friendly way to kill off the differences between Aperture and Photos would have been to add all the missing workflow stuff to Photos before killing Aperture. Photos did not get lift-and-stamp edits until late 2022, years after Aperture was discontinued, and it isn't as good as the corresponding feature in Aperture was. Also, it would have been cool if the Photos import from Aperture library had ever worked, even a little bit. I keep an external hard drive around with my old Aperture library because I know it contains photos that Photos.app still hasn't pulled in correctly.

Frustrating that Photos is really not suitable for anything other than editing snaps. I'd love to ditch Adobe, but Darktable doesn't support Fuji raws, and there really aren't that many great commercial alternatives to Lightroom that don't also have a subscription model.

> but Darktable doesn't support Fuji raws

darktable has supported Fuji raws since 2014! It currently supports the classic "uncompressed" RAFs, as well as the newfangled "lossless" (compressed) RAFs. I do not believe that it supports the "compressed" (lossy) format. So setting "recording type" appropriately on your camera is necessary.

I'm curious where the notion comes from that there is no support for Fujifilm RAF files, as I see this in a cousin comment as well.

I wish there was something like GOG but for old general software

Apple dropping Aperture right after I landed stateside was enough to knock me out of the photography hobby entirely.

Tried Darktable?

For me it didn't work with Fuji RAW, so I couldn't really use it.

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