I think I can safely say that the internet and social media has made April Fool’s Day one of the most hated days of the year. Every time it rolls around, we have to put up with a deluge of stupid jokes and a few that are good enough to be fooled by. Then there’s the actual news that you just assume is a Jobe because it’s so out there. Yes, a fun time is had by all. Not. I only partook in this ritual once and something happened today that made me think of it, but more on that in a minute. It was years ago, and it was on my old “Aperture Blog” blog. It was towards the end of Aperture before it was discontinued, and I put out a fake screenshot that I made in Photoshop and claimed that Apple had finally released Aperture X. I didn’t think anyone would fall for it as it was so obviously a joke. I was wrong.

At the time, there was a lot of frustration at Apple for basically letting the software languish in no-update hell. It had been years since it received a major upgrade, and people were beginning to wonder if it would ever be upgraded. As Apple had done something similar with Final Cut Pro 7, eventually brining out Final Cut Pro X, some people thought that maybe Apple would do the same thing with Aperture. So, I jokingly mashed up the two interfaces and created a fake “Aperture X” and put out a joke story saying Apple had finally updated the software. Some people found it funny. Others did not.

And some people were mad…. 😬

Needless to say, Apple never did upgrade the software, eventually killing it, and iPhone and rolling them both into what is now the “Photos” App. Some people at the time were convinced that this would be an even better version of Aperture and all would be fine because Apple knew best.

It was not. It still isn’t.

What got me thinking about this today, apart from the fact that it is April 1st, is that every now, and then I get a royalty statement from the Aperture Book that I wrote years ago. Today I got the quarterly statement and to my surprise, people are still buying the book. Even though Aperture was discontinued years ago now, people are obviously still interested in the software.

I can kind of understand. While it is seriously out of date now in terms of the technology and features we’ve come to expect in imaging software, it still had a special “something something” compared to the competition, even now.

The brushes feature was unique, and the only thing that I can think of that has a similar feature is Luminar, although they kind of ruined that when they went to Luminar Neo. The “Extended Range Curves” was also super useful, and nothing really has the same feature either, although you can kind of achieve this with the HDR function in Lightroom (please let me know if you would like a tutorial on how to do this).

The other feature I really loved was how good it was at handling metadata. It was much better than most current applications, and had great tools for adding and appending information into a files' metadata. To achieve this with Lightroom or even Capture One, you need plug-ins or other software like Photo Mechanic.

More than any of this, though, people just liked the interface and way of working. I still have it running on my old Mac Pro, and it’s still very fast, despite running on a 14-year-old computer. It’s a real shame that Apple discontinued Aperture, and I honestly wish that they would bring it back, but I admit that is very unlikely. I know some people saw a distant glimmer of hope with Apple purchasing Pixelmator (and Photometer) but I would be very sceptical if Apple brought back the Aperture brand. It’s far more likely that they just roll these features into Photos or other parts of the operating system. Either that or they keep the current brand. I would be thrilled to be wrong, though.