It has been quite evident for a while that Apple had little love left for Aperture, but now it’s official: the photo editing software will be retired.
I’m sure that Photos, Apple’s new photo management app, will be nice and perfectly integrated in Apple’s ecosystem, but most likely it won’t have the kind of professional tools I need.
Which leaves me with just one possibility: move to Adobe Lightroom.
I have many friends who love Lightroom, and recently I have given up and started paying for Adobe’s subscription plan, so technically I already have Lightroom installed on my Mac.
But unless I’m missing something, once I will have moved all my photo archive to Lightroom I will have to keep paying a ransom to Adobe every month just to be able to access my photos, on my computer.
Yes, I appreciate that all my files are there, but there’s a whole lotta metadata and work associated with those files which depends on Lightroom and will be lost if I don’t pay the monthly fee.
The future of our digital photos is something we should start paying much more attention to. Right now it doesn’t look very bright.
PS: as some commenters pointed out, there is an option to buy Lightroom as a standalone application which I had not been able to find. This makes the whole migration option much more likely to happen soon. Thank you all :)