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Photos is a Platform too?
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I never got the impression that Photos was supposed to be, nor was planned to be a replacement for Aperture. As a heavy user of iPhoto and now Photos, the difference is negligible better or worse. It’s just a rewrite of iPhoto. I don’t notice any performance difference and the tools are mostly the same, just relabeled or placed differently. So unless Apple specifically said something I wouldn’t hold my breath. I thought they ceded that battle to Lightroom.
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Honestly don’t hold out much hope for Photos as an Aperture replacement. I really prefer the interface of Aperture to Lightroom. Asset management is much more powerful, and you are always in the same interface. Having to jump from room to room to perform functions in LR is inhibiting. Also, Lightroom’s asset management is pretty much just folder based. Searches and organization are more refined in Aperture. I did buy the perpetual license to LR5 and got the upgrade to 6.x. At least no rental. We’ll see what can happen with extensions to Photos, but for now I’m staying on the sidelines. If nothing better shows up in the next few years, I’ll probably have to use LR. Phase One shows hope with Capture One, and they bought Media Pro from Microsoft who rather messed it up after they bought it as iView Media Pro. If they can combine those two code bases they may have the winner I’m looking for. They have the best RAW conversion, by all accounts.
Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1, Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Nikon D7000, Final Cut Pro X 10.2.2, Final Cut Studio 2 & 3, Media 100 Suite 2.1.6, Premiere Pro CS 5 5.5 and 6.0, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi, Blackmagic Ultrastudio 4K, Blackmagic Teranex, Avid MC: 2013 Mac Pro Hexacore, 1TB SSD, 64GB RAM, 2-D500: Helios 2 w 2-960GB SSDs: 2012 Hexacore MacPro 3.33 Ghz, 24Gb RAM, GTX-680, 960GB SSD: Macbook Pro Retina 2015, i7, 500GB, M370X 2GB: Macbook Pro 17″ 2011 2.2 Ghz Quadcore i7 16GB RAM 250GB SSD, Multiple OWC Thunderbay 4 TB2 and eSATA QX2 RAID 5 HD systems -
[Jim Wiseman] “I need a powerful DAM, Digital Asset Manager, for photos.”
I’ve never used Aperture, so forgive the dumb question, but what’s lacking organizationally in Photos vs Aperture?
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~ My FCPX Babbling blog ~
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~ -
Aperture has very powerful keywording capabilities, searches on almost any metadata or combinations thereof. It has Album creation capability, you can drag photos into stacks in the browser, it uses Libraries similar to FCPX where everything, metadata, non destructive RAW adjustments and the original RAW or JPG photos, etc., are stored, self contained. It also can also do referenced libraries where the originals are stored on any number of external volumes. I could go on, but it would be like trying to explain the difference between Avid and iPhone video editing. Photos seems to be a folder based flat database with limited search and meatadata capabilities. I haven’t used it, but from the reviews, pros are definitely not considering it at this point. If you have limited needs and just want a place to store photos by date and folder with limited adjustments, it might be fine. Most pros will want much more control.
Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1, Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Nikon D7000, Final Cut Pro X 10.2.2, Final Cut Studio 2 & 3, Media 100 Suite 2.1.6, Premiere Pro CS 5 5.5 and 6.0, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi, Blackmagic Ultrastudio 4K, Blackmagic Teranex, Avid MC: 2013 Mac Pro Hexacore, 1TB SSD, 64GB RAM, 2-D500: Helios 2 w 2-960GB SSDs: 2012 Hexacore MacPro 3.33 Ghz, 24Gb RAM, GTX-680, 960GB SSD: Macbook Pro Retina 2015, i7, 500GB, M370X 2GB: Macbook Pro 17″ 2011 2.2 Ghz Quadcore i7 16GB RAM 250GB SSD, Multiple OWC Thunderbay 4 TB2 and eSATA QX2 RAID 5 HD systems -
I do wonder if what happened with FCP X will be instructive for this.
When OS X was released with AV Foundation basics and all it’s Core Services, in hindsight, Randy U was obviously exploring what the new approach – allowed him to do with video streams. It’s FIRST expression was with the iMovie update. Many of those concepts carried into FCP X but very much more developed and capable. And of course, over the past 4 years, FCP X has expanded greatly into all sorts of professional areas where Libraries and other structural capabilities are important.
IF (and it’s a big speculative IF) Photos follows a similar trajectory, what then?
After the basic code changes are developed (PHOTOS) – will the evolving underlying technologies that were created for other primary purposes (Core Graphics, METAL acceleration, whatever) make it easier to enhance still image processing – and if so, will we see new Photos capabilities emerge?
Bespoke code writing feature by feature – which is how I IMAGINED it happening – might seem attractive, but if you build a house where EVERY board is custom cut and every fixture is purpose built – you end up with a SUPER complex structure that’s hard to work on and subject to issues like plumbing that fails and no off-the-shelf parts anywhere around to fix the problem rapidly.
It’s interesting to speculate that the many, many still-imaging driven folks MIGHT have more in store from Apple.
Certainly, the number of people who need or want to work with still images is at least as big as those who need or want to work with video. And if Apple has the engineering skills – why not someday either a Photos Pro – or at least a really robust 3rd party ecosystem that adds tons of modern capabilities to the underlying structure.
Fun to dream.
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
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I think photography has evolved greatly since Apple introduced iPhoto and Aperture, thanks to the near-total move to digital photography and the ubiquity of cameras in smart phones.
I feel like Apple consciously abdicated the pro-photographer market years ago when they quit competing with Lightroom. Instead they’ve opted for an approach that was optimized for the iDevice/Mac/iCloud ecosystem. From that standpoint Photos is actually a pretty good product for the average consumer photographer.
I wouldn’t expect it to go too much farther than where it is – especially now with Extensions.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
I’d have to say that photography has become a much larger market with everyone carrying a camera as part of their phone in their pocket. Also more democratic. But I have to say that a good Nikon or Canon camera with excellent lenses is going to be able to do a lot more in the hands of a professional than an iPhone or an Android. Apple did give up that market with the move to Photos, but I can tell you from professional experience that Aperture is a very competent non destructive photo editor and a much better DAM than Lightroom.
It is true that Apple stopped adding major features at about version 3.4.5, but I still prefer it to any other environment. It is very easy to roundtrip to any other photo editor, Photoshop, Affinity Photo, Topaz, OnOne Perfect Photo Suite, etc, and save directly back to an Aperture Library. The only thing I can think of that Aperture didn’t have that would be useful was lens distortion correction, but that was available as a plugin.
This whole situation with Aperture vs. Photos reminds me a lot of the discussion Bob Zelin began. There are many of us out here who mourn the demise of Aperture and are not looking forward to using Lightroom. I have over 100,000 photos going back to my first digital SLR I got in Japan in 2000. Aperture was designed from the beginning to be a digital camera photo application. Photos will sell more iPhones, but not everyone is happy about it being a replacement and not an addition.
Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1, Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Nikon D7000, Final Cut Pro X 10.2.2, Final Cut Studio 2 & 3, Media 100 Suite 2.1.6, Premiere Pro CS 5 5.5 and 6.0, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi, Blackmagic Ultrastudio 4K, Blackmagic Teranex, Avid MC: 2013 Mac Pro Hexacore, 1TB SSD, 64GB RAM, 2-D500: Helios 2 w 2-960GB SSDs: 2012 Hexacore MacPro 3.33 Ghz, 24Gb RAM, GTX-680, 960GB SSD: Macbook Pro Retina 2015, i7, 500GB, M370X 2GB: Macbook Pro 17″ 2011 2.2 Ghz Quadcore i7 16GB RAM 250GB SSD, Multiple OWC Thunderbay 4 TB2 and eSATA QX2 RAID 5 HD systems -
[Jim Wiseman] “But I have to say that a good Nikon or Canon camera with excellent lenses is going to be able to do a lot more in the hands of a professional than an iPhone or an Android. Apple did give up that market with the move to Photos, but I can tell you from professional experience that Aperture is a very competent non destructive photo editor and a much better DAM than Lightroom.
“Agreed on the cameras. It’s all in the glass. Although I prefer Lightroom, I like using Aperture, too – just a matter of preference. However, most of the pro photographers I know locally moved from Aperture to Lightroom long before Photos. I guess since Apple figured there was enough Mac software available to supply that niche, they no longer needed to focus on it.
One of the things I miss in this move is the ability, via a plug-in, to build a sequence of stills in Aperture that could be imported into FCP “classic”. It sure would be nice to see something like that return between Photos and FCPX.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Aperture 3.6 was designed to work with Yosemite, and I saw somewhere on the Apple site that Aperture 3.6 was explicitly excluded from a list of Apple applications that will no longer work with El Capitan. Hopefully that is true, but I can always keep a Yosemite partition available for Aperture. I have Lightroom 6 perpetual, and of course will be getting into it as backup, but feel no need to abandon Aperture as long as it fits my workflow and the hardware/OS runs it.
That is a good feature importing the stills to FCP Legacy. Edited: thought you wrote FCPX Have you tried it to X?. Aperture is also great at book publishing and slideshows to music.
Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1, Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Nikon D7000, Final Cut Pro X 10.2.2, Final Cut Studio 2 & 3, Media 100 Suite 2.1.6, Premiere Pro CS 5 5.5 and 6.0, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi, Blackmagic Ultrastudio 4K, Blackmagic Teranex, Avid MC: 2013 Mac Pro Hexacore, 1TB SSD, 64GB RAM, 2-D500: Helios 2 w 2-960GB SSDs: 2012 Hexacore MacPro 3.33 Ghz, 24Gb RAM, GTX-680, 960GB SSD: Macbook Pro Retina 2015, i7, 500GB, M370X 2GB: Macbook Pro 17″ 2011 2.2 Ghz Quadcore i7 16GB RAM 250GB SSD, Multiple OWC Thunderbay 4 TB2 and eSATA QX2 RAID 5 HD systems -
[Jim Wiseman] “Aperture 3.6 was designed to work with Yosemite, and I saw somewhere on the Apple site that Aperture 3.6 was explicitly excluded from a list of Apple applications that will no longer work with El Capitan.”
I’m not sure about that (one way or the other), but Apple did put Aperture back on the Mac App Store for those that already bought it. That means if you get a new machine, you can download Aperture to install on the new machine. It had been completely removed for awhile (shades of FCP).
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com
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