I’m not particularly interested in photo editing or management, professional or not, but one thing I do know is that many people who are miss one application in particular: Aperture. Discontinued over a decade ago, people still lament its loss, and Daniel Kennett explains to us layman why that’s the case.

Aperture’s technical brilliance is remarkable in how quiet it is. There’s no BEHOLD RAINBOW SPARKLE ANIMATIONS WHILE THE AI MAKES AUNT JANICE LOOK LIKE AN ANTHROPOMORPHISED CARROT, just an understated dedication to making the tool you’re using work for you in exactly the way you want to work.

It’s the kind of monumental engineering effort that the user is unlikely to ever notice, simply because of how obvious it is to use — if I want to zoom in to this photo, I point at it with the zoom thing. Duh. Sure, it’s a tiny thumbnail inside a small thumbnail of a page in a book… but how else would it work?

And that is why Aperture was so special. It was powered by some of the most impressive technology around at the time, but you’d never even know it because you were too busy getting shit done.

↫ Daniel Kennett

I half-expected to get some wishy-washy vibes-based article about some professional photo management tool, but instead, I came away easily and clearly understanding what made Aperture such a great tool. Beng able to access any set of tools wherever you are, without having to take a photo to a certain specific place in the user interface makes perfect sense to me, and the given counterexample from the modern Photos application instantly feels cumbersome and grating.

At this point it’s clear Aperture’s never coming back, but I’m rather surprised nobody seems to have taken the effort to clone it. It seems there’s a market out there for something like this, but from what I gather Lightroom isn’t what Aperture fans are looking for, and any other alternatives are simply too limited or unpolished.

There’s a market here, for sure. What other alternatives to Aperture exist today?

I knew digital cameras and phones had to do a lot of processing and other types of magic to output anything human eyes can work with, but I had no idea just how much. This is wild.