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Apple will no longer continue development on its professional photography application, Aperture, reports The Loop. Instead, the company is working on the Photos app for Mac that it introduced during the Worldwide Developer's Conference.
"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."
The Photos app, which was shown off only briefly during WWDC, will combine with iCloud Photo Library, replacing both Aperture and iPhoto. While Photos will allow users to store, search, and edit photos via the cloud on Apple devices, it is unlikely to include the more robust, professional-oriented tools found in Aperture.
Aperture, which has long lagged behind competing software like Lightroom from Adobe, saw its last major version update to 3.5 on October 22, 2013, and since then, the software has seen just one last minor update. One of the major complaints about Aperture has been its infrequent updates, and many users have wondered if and when Apple would release Aperture 4. With no plans to continue development, professional photographers will want to find another solution, such as Lightroom.
According to TechCrunch, Apple will continue to provide compatibility updates to allow Aperture to run on OS X Yosemite, but development will stop.
Top Rated Comments
(View all)Like seriously. It needs to have ALL the adjustments...I worry about plug-in capability.
Ugh.
This new Photos app better be DAMN good if they're killing off Aperture.
Think Pages/Keynote/Numbers. It will be a shadow of its former self.
You're kidding yourself when you say "The new Photos app must be DAMN good" then... It's not about being an Aperture replacement. It's about being for the mass market, hence Apple is giving the option of migrating from Aperture to Light Room. If you like all the features of Aperture, you won't want to go to Photos.