It’s been a number of years since Apple pushed their professional grade photo editing solution onto an ice floe to die quietly out of sight and out of mind. Many customers still lament the decision because Aperture was a really great product and Apple shill marketing notwithstanding, Photos is such a pale replacement as to be nearly transparent.

On the announcement, Adobe and others created tools to enable the transport of the Aperture library to their own similar offerings. For Adobe, this was and remains Lightroom. Aperture had it’s own digital asset manager and to date, the only serious competitor with market presence has been Lightroom.

For Aperture users, the migration is simple but take a while using a plug-in. As time has passed the visibility to this plugin has become diminished on the assumption that demand had trailed off.

Well, Adobe was wrong.

You see Apple has announced that Aperture will not run on the next version of macOS expected this fall. While there have been no updates to Aperture for years, it still runs on the current at time of writing macOS Mojave. There are folks who still use it regularly and a number who keep it around because all their old libraries are in there.

As of the next macOS, it will not even launch. Thus, now is the time to move those images. The tool exists for Lightroom and having done this for many clients I know that it works. Not every piece of structure and metadata comes over, but your images and basic folder structures do and that’s what you need. The migration requires as least as much free disk space as the size of the existing Aperture library as Lightroom needs to move the files to its own DAM. Once migrated, you can delete the old Aperture library.

Apple has been signalling for some time that the needs of professional creatives is not high on their radar. They abandoned Aperture in favour of the more dummy friendly and less functional Photos. Final Cut Pro X and Logic Pro X are the only remaining true Pro apps, and I for one, worry for their future since in my opinion, Apple has seriously lost its way since the passing of Steve Jobs. Form over function is their current hallmark, and for working people that’s the pinnacle of stupid.

If you have Aperture, best get those libraries migrated before Adobe does something similarly dumb and kills off the ability of the Aperture migration plug-in to work. Apple is not alone in the realm of brute stupidity.

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I'm Ross Chevalier, thanks for reading, watching and listening and until next time, peace.