I’m not particularly interested in photo editing or management, professional or not, but one thing I do know is that many people who are miss one application in particular: Aperture. Discontinued over a decade ago, people still lament its loss, and Daniel Kennett explains to us layman why that’s the case.
Aperture’s technical brilliance is remarkable in how quiet it is. There’s no BEHOLD RAINBOW SPARKLE ANIMATIONS WHILE THE AI MAKES AUNT JANICE LOOK LIKE AN ANTHROPOMORPHISED CARROT, just an understated dedication to making the tool you’re using work for you in exactly the way you want to work.
It’s the kind of monumental engineering effort that the user is unlikely to ever notice, simply because of how obvious it is to use — if I want to zoom in to this photo, I point at it with the zoom thing. Duh. Sure, it’s a tiny thumbnail inside a small thumbnail of a page in a book… but how else would it work?
And that is why Aperture was so special. It was powered by some of the most impressive technology around at the time, but you’d never even know it because you were too busy getting shit done.
↫ Daniel Kennett
I half-expected to get some wishy-washy vibes-based article about some professional photo management tool, but instead, I came away easily and clearly understanding what made Aperture such a great tool. Beng able to access any set of tools wherever you are, without having to take a photo to a certain specific place in the user interface makes perfect sense to me, and the given counterexample from the modern Photos application instantly feels cumbersome and grating.
At this point it’s clear Aperture’s never coming back, but I’m rather surprised nobody seems to have taken the effort to clone it. It seems there’s a market out there for something like this, but from what I gather Lightroom isn’t what Aperture fans are looking for, and any other alternatives are simply too limited or unpolished.
There’s a market here, for sure. What other alternatives to Aperture exist today?
Capture One is the closest thing to Aperture’s workflow, and UI customisability. It shares Aperture’s ability to have separate windows for thumbnail browsing / library management and viewing / editing. It also allows you to tear off all the tools as traditional floating palettes (the way software ALWAYS did before people started making applications as if no one used more than a single monitor). C1 can also import Aperture libraries.
What C1 can’t do, is import direct from an iOS device to a referenced library structure, but if you’re willing to import with Image Capture, it can easily handle your iOS device photos as well.
One area Aperture does show its age is its image processing engine, Capture One can rescue images that Aperture really can’t handle – blown-out skies, edge fringing, that sort of thing.
How’s C1 performance-wise?
I do enjoy NX Studio (all my digital work is Nikon) but it is also buggy and slow, and for some reason it chokes when there are background file copies going on (impossible to use it if you are at the same time backing up your images to the NAS). And I became very averse to paying money for rubbish.
I don’t take photos with phones (the Librem 5 doesn’t have a fantastic camera), but otherwise the use case is: digital 45mp, 45mp 35mm scans and 150+mp large format scans. Digital is from RAW and the scans are 16-bit uncompressed TIFFs.
If you have experience with very large files, I’d love to know your thoughts.
I’m editing primarily D800 / D810 / D850 RAW files on a 2019 Mac Pro with dual W5700X GPUs, and loading images from a Samsung 990 Pro NVME SSD on a PCI card. It’s as fast as I am; I’m not really ever waiting around for it to do things.
But even on an old Mac Pro 5,1 with an RX580 performance was fine, Maybe a second after a trackpad zoom for the view to switch from low res proxy to full resolution.
Something C1 doesn’t have, is the ability to see which focus point was active in the shot, which is annoying.
I’ve ranted about Aperture here many many times, but now we are finally on topic.
Aperture was incredible. I paid full price when it launched, with its glorious box, and it took me 10 years to fully migrate away from it. What made it so special for me:
– at the beginning, storage was very expensive. I could have the originals in different external hard drives at home and I’d still be able to see a very high resolution preview when on the go. Heck, you could even choose the resolution of the preview and I had it set to the resolution of my 30 inch display (2560×1600).
– I lost a few photos to bit rot. When I got my first ZFS server, I moved the Vault (Aperture automatically built-in backup solution) to my ZFS server mounted via NFS and… that was it.
– When I had enough storage to have everything also locally, moving the originals (master) was a matter of 2-3 clicks and it moved everything in the background back to my laptop for me.
– It was incredibly responsive.
– It would remember where I left the floating HUD tools.
– Getting most images from 0-100% took only a few seconds. For the other images, I could easily go from 0-99%.
– You could choose an external editor very easily and Aperture would launch it for you. Let’s say, it would launch GIMP or Photoshop with a copy of the latest version and, when you would save it, it would update the internal Aperture version and all the low res preview assets.
– Faces, Maps. Fast, offline, effective.
– Integration with AppleScript and Automator, which I used to manage backups and actions after importing.
It was TRULY a professional tool, not a toy. Took me years and years to migrate everything out of it (25+ years of personal and professional photos). I got so tired of getting burned that I use NX Studio (free from Nikon) for basic photo processing and I manage the folder structure on my own. I still have a 2009 Mac Pro with Mojave and Aperture in case I need to refer to different versions of my work or find out projects I had automatically organized around photo metadata (studies in color, special portraits, etc)
A few weeks ago, I installed Photoshop trial to deliver a single work and I was shocked by how slow it was and how bizarre the interface became. Otherwise, I work in GIMP, NX Studio and darktable.
Anecdote: I shoot large format and often deal with 24000×15000 images. When I try to remove dust in GIMP, every click results in a 3-4 seconds freeze. Doing levels and curves usually involve waiting a 30-40 second wait on a ThinkPad P1 Gen 4 with a Xeon CPU, RAID0 nvmes and 64GB of RAM (same lag both in Windows and FreeBSD). Sometimes I use Luminar Neo and the interface is full of animations that bump up GPU usage, freezes often and sometimes I have no idea why it takes so long to do such silly adjustments.
I go to my Power Mac G5 (DC late 2005), launch Photoshop CS2. There is no lag when removing dust. Levels and curves take 5 seconds and never crash. Sometimes GIMP crashes on my new machine. Also scrolling large TIFF files is way faster on the G5 (200-300ms full screen refresh) both in Photoshop and Preview than on my new machine on GIMP or Windows Photos. Both choke.
Also the Canon layout program is faster to process photos for my photo printer (PRO-1000) on the old Mac Pro than the ThinkPad. Half of the time.
It is just stupid, really. Everything now is a toy for Instagrammers and YouTubers. For large resolution professional work, I have no idea what happened to the software. Everything is just slow and objectively worse in most aspects.
I don’t have the personality traits to ever become obscenely rich or powerful but, if I would, I’d bribe Mr Cook to bring Aperture back.