Comment by jwr
2 days ago
After Apple suddenly discontinued Aperture, which left users like me with huge complex photo archives hanging, I will never trust any professional software tool from Apple again. It is a disaster that I still haven't fully recovered from.
I've learned my lesson — all my archives will now be maintained by me, in file structures, with metadata in text files.
Me too, with Aperture. Huge misstep and insult to the user base.
This is a useful tool: https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive
However, you still need to run an older OS. I've still got on my todo list the process of fixing all of this.
It's been a decade and it still hurts that it was discontinued.
Learned that lesson too. Then got into Lightroom. Now getting out of that by exporting stuff slowly. Moving to files on disk and edits in Darktable now. No "library".
Not only Aperture. The FCP7-FCPX transition was a disaster as well.
Please don’t take this as me saying you were wrong to ever trust Apple, however the best way to organise any data is usually just files on a disk.
That’s becoming a recurring theme for me and even some of my corporate clients now. Confluence, for example, is out the window for secure documentation around sensitive environments and Word Docs in One Drive are back in. It’s surprisingly refreshing and gets the job done way better.
It's all true, but if you think organizing photo archives is easy, boy have I got news for you.
Metadata, versions, version groupings, projects, albums, there is lots of structure that most people don't realize exists.
Think every picture has an EXIF date and that's the date when it was taken? Think again. Scanning date is not the same as picture date.
Actually, even if you think of a date, you probably imagine the usual ISO8601 2026-01-14T17:37:46Z date — how about when we only know a year? This is something Aperture didn't do either, but when dealing with photo archives what you want is arbitrary precision date intervals. E.g. 1900-1902 for example.
Anyway. Just pointing out that even though "just files on disk" is the right approach, managing those files and their metadata is far from obvious.
From what I recall, aperture did use files-on-a-disk, maintaining original photos read-only and letting everything else be operations on those originals.
(am I recalling correctly?)
Agree with all of this, apart from possibly OneDrive but that's for another post.
Not Apple-specific really that point for sure anyway. Personally I don't think we should ever ever trust any vendor to control our data or act as a proxy for access to it. If it's not on a physical disk in your hands, in a format which is documented and can be opened by more than one application, then you're one step away from being screwed. There are so many tangible risks we love to sweep under the rug from geopolitics, commercial stability, security, bugs to unexpected side effects. And I've seen some real horror stories on all of those fronts.
At the same time I managed to embed myself thoroughly in it and I'm 3 months in to undoing the mess. It's VERY hard to get back to files on disk. No moving away from that is probably the best option I suspect a lot of us never took.
Hardest stuff to get out of is iCloud/Apple and Adobe.
Power tip: replace the Word docs with Markdown.
Thinking that Markdown is comparable to a Word doc for even most purposes is delusional.
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The Aperture discontinuation still pains me as well. Especially since I can't even run it anymore.
I also bought Final Cut Express. Not sure I'll buy Apple software again either.
Logic users on Windows also weren't too happy when Apple bought Emagic and dropped Windows support shortly after.