For 12 Years, I’ve Wanted Apple to Bring Back Aperture. Claude Code Helped Me Do It in a Week

Vibe-coding is making it way easier to solve very specific software problems.

EXPERT OPINION BY JASON ATEN, TECH COLUMNIST @JASONATEN

I started photographing professionally in 2006. It was a year after Apple introduced Aperture, and for most of the following decade, that was the tool I relied on to cull, edit, and process hundreds of thousands of photos for portrait, commercial, and wedding clients.

Around the same time, Adobe introduced Lightroom, but Aperture just fit far better with the way my brain worked. I loved the more flexible organization structure, including Aperture’s Stacks. You could also create several versions of an image without duplicating the RAW file. It also had a simple, intuitive, unified interface—unlike Lightroom’s complex modules that separated the Library from the editing tool, called “Develop.”

Then, in 2014, Apple announced it would no longer support Aperture. And, for the last 12 years, I’ve waited—hoping that somehow Apple might just change its mind and bring back my favorite photo editing tool ever.

I’m sure Apple would say just use Photos.

I’m sure Apple would say “just use Photos.” To be fair, Photos is fine. It’s where iPhone Photos go by default, and it’s very good at that. But, it’s not a professional tool. It’s not really designed for culling and editing RAW files, certainly not thousands of them.

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In the meantime, I’ve tried a number of other tools. Mostly, I did what a lot of photographers did and switched primarily to using Lightroom. For most of the past eight years, I’ve used the newer version of Lightroom because it was far simpler and more streamlined.

But, in the past year, I’ve begun photographing Formula One races, which requires a very different workflow from what Lightroom CC provides. Mainly that’s because I shoot a lot of photos and need a tool that can handle fast culling and organization of thousands of photos.

That’s exactly what Aperture was. It’s the only tool that ever really worked the way my brain does. Also, it’s pretty annoying to pay Adobe a subscription every month for a tool I mostly just tolerate. Especially since that tool insists I store all my images in the cloud, meaning I also have to keep paying for additional cloud storage the more I use the product. It’s really an absurd model, but for some reason we all just accept it as though it’s a cost of doing business.

Source: www.inc.com