Yeah, I only used Lightroom Classic. I tried regular Lightroom once, did not like.

And I agree, I liked aperture better than Lightroom at the time too, but Lightroom progressed while Aperture started pushin daisies.

I’ve recently given Darktable a try. It seems promising, but it’s different enough to be a frustrating transition.

Yeah, I liked aperture too. I do think Lightroom got a ton better in the ensuing years than aperture ever was, but it’s like $15 a month now iirc.

It was cheaper, but mostly they refocused the product from filmmakers to youtubers. The latter is a 10x (or maybe 100x) bigger customer base, so it sorta makes sense, but unfortunately for Apple they threw away the filmmaker customer base and failed to acquire the youtuber customer base. And the filmmakers didn’t forget being cast aside. FCP usage in the industry fall off a cliff and never recovered.

Premiere has a lot of the market share Apple wanted, but even they are losing ground to Resolve; a highly capable product that’s inexpensive, and made by a company that doesn’t have the baggage of fucking over its customers. Resolve right now is free if you don’t need the studio features, and $300 for life if you do.

Yeah, competition is good, but I’m not sure this is competition. These products were mostly free already, and the paid stuff in the bundle is, I guess… Pixelmator and FCPX, and at what appear to be much higher prices.

Then of course Apple is pretty famous for fucking over creatives by just dropping products. Film professionals still haven’t forgiven Apple over FCPX, and then Aperture… they just dropped it one day and kinda forced people over to Lightroom. It’s gonna be hard to earn back trust of people who’ve been burned by Apple in the past.

The ideal thing is to actually move to Darktable. https://mathiashueber.com/migrate-from-lightroom-to-open-source-alternative/

Be prepared to commit some time to the transition though. I installed darktable and gave it a try a couple days ago. There’s enough similarity to make you think it’ll be an easy transition, but it sure wasn’t for me. It took me an hour to do something that would have taken 5 mins in Lightroom. I’m glad to have it, and it seems like a powerful tool, so I’m not complaining, just sayin… be prepared to commit some time to learning where everything is.