As a professional photographer software is the tool standing between my vision and the camera. On a trip to Dublin in 2008, I got introduced to Aperture 2. As a Lightroom user, Aperture brought a clarity into my workflow. The upgrade to Aperture 3 made me use this software as a daily tool. Easy to use, project library support and great looking results. With minimal effort I got great images.
Until Lightroom 5. The latest from Adobe brought a brand new image engine, in the regular interface that I learned years ago. While compared to Aperture, using Lightroom can be a bit of a pain, but in the end, my images looked better. So I made the switch. For 100 different libraries (one for each month) I exported all RAW images, imported them into a brand new library with keywords intact following the YYYY/MM/DD folder structure.
For a while, I kept Aperture running for my iPhone pictures. Every image got imported through Photostream into a big library containing every mobile picture I ever took.
Until Photos.app.
With Apple pledging support for creative professionals with the release of Final Cut Pro X, it’s sad that they decided to pull the plug on Aperture. From a commercial perspective, I’m all okay with it. However, the new combined Photos.app doesn’t make my images look better, but worse. I was hoping for an update of the image engine, but it’s only a complete downgrade. Even regular things like an edit mode, that was easy to do before, now are just complicated.
On the same hardware I run Lightroom without a hitch, Photos.app brings out the fans like a leaf blower , unresponsiveness and beachballs.
While it did take a bit of effort and time, all my mobile images just got merged into Lightroom, bringing the total to 170.000 images stored in the same library. No hitch at all. Quite impressive!
But for Photos.app .. it might be a great mobile picture viewer for grandma, but real photographers shouldn’t bother.
