The Heartbreak That Was Aperture

I remember when I received the news from Apple: they were discontinuing their professional photo application, Aperture. The phone call was a heads up before the official press release broke. I thought it was a joke.

I wasn’t an Apple employee, but I had been working closely with the Pro Apps division for years. From 2010–14, I had a terrific relationship with the photography folks there, and even produced a podcast for the Aperture community. That all ended in June 2014. Not only for me, but for thousands of photographers who depended on that software for their work.

I never got a straight answer as to why they ceased development of such a popular product. No one was available to ask about it. My contacts had mysteriously migrated to other departments. Even that phone call was from someone I didn’t know. The entire situation was surreal, like learning from a street corner stranger that your girlfriend had broken up with you.

“What’s that again? And who the hell are you?”

The software replacing Aperture was called Photos. It would serve as the pretty face for Apple’s iCloud Photo Library. Cute, yes. Brains, no — at least not in the beginning.

My online photo community was furious. They had spent years building extensive image libraries with Apple’s software, only to have it ripped from…