Apple is right to let Aperture go

Question

After at first being a little surprised at Aperture’s demise it occurred to me that Apple is right to do this. Continuing to develop an app with small market share on an operating system with small market share makes little sense. It is better for them to admit defeat and try something better then continuing to go down the wrong path.
The technology landscape has changed a lot since 2005 when Aperture 1.0 came out. There are different ways to access files such as sandboxing and iCloud drive. These technologies will become an important way to get photos between a Mac and an iOS device. Tagging files in Aperture was helpful but relying on the tagging system built into the OS would be a much better solution (someone else just mentioned this recently and I strongly agree.) If a new pro photo app made it’s tags available to the Finder and Spotlight those tags should show up along side similarly tagged files that were created in other programs.
Also Aperture’s competition from Adobe is fundamentally flawed. An all new pro app could address the problems that Adobe’s photography apps have. Anyone who has used Adobe’s solutions should be well aware of their shortcomings.
1. Photoshop, which came into being in the 1980s, was not built around technology like raw and therefore requires a rather clumsy workflow.
2. When a document gets exported to Photoshop the user is presented with a confusing array of choices as to how that photograph should be handled. Each option with it’s own series of advantages and drawbacks.
When a photo gets brought back into LR after being edited in PS it creates a new copy. If that photo then gets edit a second and third time it just keeps creating more copies of the image. The same problem can be said of adobe camera raw.
4. I always thought it was a little odd that you have to export an image from LR in order to use it in another app. App’s like LR, Aperture, and Photos are file navigation programs so why do I need to bring a photo from one navigation program (Lightroom) into another navigation program (the Finder) in order to work with it? Yes, I realize that at times you may need a smaller resolution file of an image like for a webpage but why can’t I just make a smaller version from within the photo navigation program and keep the images all in the same app? Doesn’t make sense to me.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Modern apps like Pixelmator are similar to PS except they can handle raw directly from within the app. It seems like it would be possible to team up with Pixelmator so that a raw photo could go between the two apps while keeping all their settings in tact and not requiring users to make unnecessary duplicates of exported files. For an example you could change the brightness in Apple’s Pro app and then it would still stay at the same setting in Pixelmator. And then if you changed the brightness again in Pixelmator the adjustment bar setting would be brought over to Apple’s Photos.
Since Pixelmator didn’t exist when Aperture 1.0 came out the two companies were not able to unify their two products. When you start over with a new product considerations like this can be taken into account. One of the things I hate about Adobe’s photo apps is the way that a lot of modern technology like raw feels very tacked on (because it is.)

Answer 1

Well there are standards and they are the IPTC/exif metadata. Across all OSes. And even after Apple adopted Mavericks tags it still uses keywords in its photo applications. And no mav tags in iOS either (but you CAN read IPTC/exif data in photos in iOS). Tags are in extended attributes, and hence may be  inaccessible in another filesystem.Even Apple Mail doesn't use them. You have to put the tag in the form of x-tag or something into the header info (BTW, if you like tags, as I do, check out MailTags. It does this and more).
If you photo apps don't read standard IPTC/exif data something is seriously wrong. Also you don't have to dig through hundreds of criteria to search for photo metadata. The stuff is already indexed; the categories like aperture, caption, etc are ways to narrow searches. All your LR keywords would be in the Spotlight index, assuming you enable Spotlight on the volumes where they reside, and that you wrote the keyword metadata to the files.
I think you have a stronger point re tagging/keywording in regards to XMP sidecars. Yet another area for improvement. If you add keywords to a RAW in Aperture or LR they are not gonna write that keyword to the RAW unless you apply some force. The standard way of doing that is by using XMP sidecar files. And short answer is that for some Spotlight indexes the XMPs via the rich text mdimporter; for some this means modifying that same importer. In either case, if Spotlight finds the keyword it can only point you to the sidecar, not the companion RAW. Since a tag is in the extended attributes, it sorta isn't in the RAW, but Spotlight would send you to the RAW if it were tagged. So allowing THAT kind of tagging in Aperture, LR or whatever would be great IMHO.
And I'd like to ADD tags from Aperture. But I'd always want it to be in addition to photo keywords and other metadata. Just like captions, filenames, and other stuff is separate. I can still search for them at the same time if I want. Or ignore them. And you may already have the "wedding" problem: that word may in the content of files, or in a filename, or in an email header, or a web url, or whatever. Even without photo metadata you sometimes have to tell Spotlight to ONLY search tags and ignore other criteria.
Since you like tags, check out Leap. I use it to keep lots of stuff together that have tags and keywords, and other searchable attributes. Even email. All in one place.  And HoudahSpot; it has templates you can set up for just photos and it displays all the photo metadata in one panel.
And although I'd like to see it happen, non-destructive editing can be a problem because edits have to be stored somewhere. A universal format would be cool, but we'll see. Editors like Pixelmator are different tools than DAMs like Aperture, even though they both can say crop or change contrast. You'll find tons of photographers who never use PS, and tons of graphic artists who never use Aperture. Depends on the focus of your work. Even the system wide versioning Apple introduced for stuff like Pages or Text Edit hasn't been universally loved. And BTW, not sure Pixelmator doesn't view Apple as a competitor. Sure, Apple may provide them with some cool tools to sell more Pixelmators...or may develop an application that'll make Pixelmator disappear. And Filemaker is an interesting example: Apple formed Claris, which bought whatever FM was at that point (from MS?). Eventually Apple brought stuff from Claris back in (AW?), and left FM with Claris, which changed its name. Maybe they should Aperture OUT to Pixelmator   I'd LOVE that. Shoot, given Apple's assets they could send it to 'em free.
And sorry Frank, I shoulda been more specific. I meant "in Aperture" as in the program itself, not a media browser like what you show (and basically iMedia Browser is the same thing, but with LR catalogs in addition to Aperture or iPhoto or file folders).