Aperture was a great application for editing photos back in the day, but it hasn’t been supported by Apple for years. You can, however, still run it on the latest Macs, should you need to. But that won’t be the case for long, the company has announced.
In a support page pointed out by MacRumors, Apple explains that “for technical reasons, Aperture will not run in future versions of macOS after macOS Mojave.”
What exactly those technical reasons are only Apple knows, but it isn’t hard to imagine the various file structures, architectures, libraries and so on that Aperture relied on are simply no longer compatible with the changes the company has made to the OS. Indeed, macOS has come quite a distance since Aperture was abandoned in 2014, and it’s actually kind of impressive that the app still runs.
You can, of course, keep a machine running Mojave if you really need to use Aperture for some reason or another, but honestly, there’s not much reason any more. The photo editor has long been outpaced by its competition, the likes of Lightroom, Capture One and, of course, mobile photography software. Apple’s own Photos app is nothing like Aperture, but fills some of the same roles.
To that end, Apple suggests you migrate your Aperture photo library into either Lightroom Classic, which has an import tool specifically for this, or Photos, which should automatically import your old library when you launch it for the first time. If it hasn’t already, you can hold down the option key while opening it and it will let you manually add a library to it.
Be aware, however, that adjustments and other settings you’ve made in Aperture may not carry over or might be set in stone once they arrive in their new home. So if you’ve been putting off editing that one shoot from all those years ago… better do that first.
It’s sad to see a good product finally fade away completely, but I’ve already shed those tears, moved on to Lightroom and never looked back. I wish Apple prioritized its pro and pro-ish users more too, but what can I say? They don’t.