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Apple has sent an email to Aperture customers this afternoon as a reminder about the impending removal of the professional photo editing software from the Mac App Store. The email confirms that Aperture will be removed from the Mac App Store upon the release of Photos for OS X as we initially reported last month.
"When Photos for OS X launches this spring, Aperture will no longer be available for purchase from the Mac App Store. You can continue to use Aperture on OS X Yosemite, but you will not be able to buy additional copies of the app.
You can migrate your Aperture library to Photos for OS X, including your photos, adjustments, albums, and keywords. After migrating, your Aperture library remains intact. However, Aperture and Photos do not share a unified library, so any changes made after the migration will not be shared between the apps."
Aperture users will be able to continue using the software on OS X Yosemite following its discontinuation, although the app will no longer be available for purchase on the Mac App Store and new feature updates are not planned. Aperture users can migrate their photo libraries to Photos for OS X, including photos, adjustments, albums and keywords.
Photos for OS X will be available this spring for OS X Yosemite.
Top Rated Comments
I'd rather have a subset of my photos in iCloud, and keep the rest archived on my computer and not using up iCloud space.
It just shows that Apple seems to be doing this to sell iCloud subscriptions, and not to improve the user experience.
Edit: Sad to see Aperture go. I really love it. Photos feels promising now that I've been working with it for a while but I am already missing a few things from Aperture. Not enough to pay Adobe, but hoping Photos gets developed further or even some add ons come out eventually that we can buy.
Screwed.
I just talked to Apple via chat, because I was curious as well. They confirmed what I said. It will be like any other app. Once discontinued, you can still download it, but cannot buy additional copies. They also said they will keep it functional through Yosemite's life cycle but it won't be updated for future versions of OS X. Still available and may or may not work down the road with whatever follows Yosemite, but it will keep working with Yosemite and you can still download it from the Apple ID you purchased it with prior to it's discontinuation.
You can actually keep multiple libraries in OS X Photos! Hold the option key while starting the application, and it will ask you which library to use (or create a new one). Only the 'system' library will be attached to iCloud (if you choose to), and I'm personally keeping my 500GB+ Aperture library as a separate, local Photos library.