Adobe 'Doubling Down' on Lightroom in Wake of Apple's Aperture Announcement
Following Apple's announcement that it plans to cease further development on its professional photo editing software, Aperture, Adobe has released a statement encouraging Aperture users to check out its Creative Cloud plan or its standalone Lightroom app, a longtime Aperture competitor. The company says it is committed to helping former Aperture and iPhoto customers transition to Lightroom.

Put simply we're doubling down on our investments in Lightroom and the new Creative Cloud Photography plan and you can expect to see a rich roadmap of rapid innovation for desktop, web and device workflows in the coming weeks, months and years. We also continue to invest actively on the iOS and OSX platforms, and are committed to helping interested iPhoto and Aperture customers migrate to our rich solution across desktop, device and web workflows.
Known as Aperture's biggest competitor, Lightroom is another solution for professional photo editing. Adobe has a Creative Cloud subscription plan aimed specifically at photographers, offering access to both Photoshop and Lightroom for $9.99 per month. While this plan used to be temporary, Adobe recently made it a permanent addition to Creative Cloud. Adobe also offers access to its full suite of Creative Cloud apps, including Lightroom, for $49.99 per month.
Adobe has developed Lightroom mobile apps for both the iPhone and the iPad, both of which seamlessly connect to the desktop version of Lightroom, allowing users to edit and manage their library of photos on any device.
While both Aperture and Lightroom offer similar professional photo editing capabilities, Lightroom has enjoyed regular updates as part of Adobe's Creative Cloud, while Aperture has been falling behind for quite some time now. Lightroom received an update earlier this month, while Aperture was last updated in November of 2013.
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Top Rated Comments
Unfortunately, this is terrible news for Lightroom users. It's pretty widely-thought that the only reason Adobe sells Lightroom stand-alone is because of competition from Aperture. All Adobe's other Creative Suite apps are now cloud-only.
With the Photoshop/Lightroom cloud offering and Apple killing Aperture, expect the next version of Lightroom to be cloud-only.
You don't seem to understand why people are irritated. That $10 a month works out (for me) as $600 over the past five years since I started using LR if I was paying for their monthly cloud BS.
Not to mention that I have to keep paying that monthly extortion or I lose access to my library.
People like you are playing right into their schemes where everything is "pay pay pay" and never own anything. $10 might not seem like much, until there's no other game in town and they triple that to $30 a month.
In a world where you don't own any of the software you use and have to pay monthly subscriptions for all of them those costs are going to wind up being what a car payment used to be.
$30 for adobe software.
$50 for MS software
$30 for Quicken software
Do you see why people are irritated? It's like streaming movies. Pay $20 for a virtualized copy of a movie you can't download and watch offline. Maybe doesn't seem like a big deal until the company goes out of business, or loses distribution rights to that movie, or your internet is down for a weekend when you want to watch movies (like during a blizzard).