Closing Aperture

The writing has been on the wall for a while, but now it’s official:

Apple has told The Loop that the company will be ceasing development of Aperture and iPhoto, offering Photos for OS X as a replacement, which was first shown at WWDC.

“With the introduction of the new Photos app and iCloud Photo Library, enabling you to safely store all of your photos in iCloud and access them from anywhere, there will be no new development of Aperture,” said Apple in a statement provided to The Loop. “When Photos for OS X ships next year, users will be able to migrate their existing Aperture libraries to Photos for OS.”

Apple says libraries will be able to migrate across to the new application when the application ships. Apple is working with Adobe to offer a upgrade path to Lightroom.

Aperture 3 is hands-down my favorite photo management software, and I’m sad to see it go. I’ll give Photos a shot — the demo was certainly impressive — but if it isn’t up to pro spec, then it looks like I’ll have to take that upgrade path to Lightroom. And after finally getting the last Adobe product off my computers.

Or I’ll just keep using Aperture until it’s so out of date it doesn’t support some future camera I’m shooting, which seems the most likely case.