I just wish Apple wasn’t so silent because then they wouldn’t need to resort to recruiting iPhoto users. They have gained nothing from silence so why not be more open, their always secret attitude maybe hurting them.

I’m speaking as an Aperture user who likes LightRoom but can’t get round its filesystem management so I don’t use it. I speak not as a blind devotee either.

Sorry, from where I sit Aperture is a case of “Fooled me once… fooled me twice… ” and now? How can I take this “professional” product seriously?

At it’s release, Aperture started as a deeply flawed product, with simply abominable RAW processing. Once it was improved, after teams were fired, etc, it was far from a broad professional product, with limited camera support and spotty performance and updates. With the release of v2, we hoped we were seeing a serious commitment to Aperture by Apple, but it was simply more of the same… a big fix, lots of press, no communication from Apple about the future of the product, and all the while, Adobe’s Lightroom has maintained consistent, steady progress, communication and support by Adobe. As a result, today Lightroom has huge market share and is probably the fastest growing workflow solution.

Here’s the big issue. Any professional photographer cannot afford to guess at the workflow they should be using. To commit to a system and covert to it is a sizable investment of time and money, and you need to know that it’s going to support you for a long time to come- especially a workflow like Aperture that is built around proprietary catalog system, as it was originally. More than a few that I know personally have, on the faith of what Apple’s marketing has promised, made that investment only to be forced to re-invest in switching back to an Adobe workflow, notably Lightroom.

Maybe Apple is appealing to the “pro-sumer” market, those photographers who don’t need to pay the mortgage with their work, but are committed to their avocation and enjoy identifying with the pro. A working professional, however, can’t afford to waste time guessing at what Apple will do next, especially when those guesses include, as they have in the past few years, the possibility that Apple may drop the product entirely.

Aperture has been a case study in how not to develop a product. Besides my personal opinion that Apple is telling photographers how they should be working, rather than providing a product that is for how they ARE working, you just have to wonder how many false starts the product will go through before the industry calls it for what it is- which you’ve pointed out above.

The fact that Aperture is, after all that, still even considered a viable professional solution is a testament to the blind devotion of Apple fan-base, certainly not Apple’s commitment to developing and supporting a viable product.