Apple has just released Aperture 2.0 today. A nice product to manage your photographs has gotten even nicer. But — there should not be a need for Aperture.
Digital asset management, which is the predominant function of applications like Aperture and Adobe Lightroom, should not need to exist, especially not if you are Apple.
If Steve Jobs were to take his own media hub strategy seriously, advanced asset management capabilities should be available right in the file-system as a function of the OS. Asset management for photographs is why people buy computers today, so why does a separate application need to deal with our most precious assets. Incremental revenues, perhaps?
Today’s proprietary photo management systems eat disk space like nothing else. Non-destructive editing is supported by making extra copies of originals (especially when using an external editor). The derivatives are usually larger in size than their originals (especially when stored in TIFF or PSD), forcing you to stock up on hard disk space.
I will keep using LightZone as my chief photo editor and save precious disk space by leaving my photographs right where they are. Can’t wait till the operating system innovates and supports photographs natively.
