For quite some time now, there has been quite a lot of speculation of whether Apple will keep development of Aperture.

Recently, Aperture development seemed to be stagnant and at the same time Adobe kept adding more and more new features into Lightroom making it into a powerful application for photographers.

Now, Apple officially announced that they’re not going to keep developing Aperture any more. More on this in my earlier post:

Apple stops developing Aperture

If you have been looking into making a switch to Lightroom now might be a good time as Adobe announced that they’re going to keep Creative Cloud Photography plan as a permanent offer for £8.78 a month ($9.99 in the US).

Adobe Creative Cloud Photography plan

If you want to switch from Aperture to Lightroom, I’m going to explain a few things in here.

How To Store Your Photos

With Aperture you can store your photos anywhere you want and let Aperture reference to them or you can keep your photos in your Aperture library (this doesn’t give you direct access to your images like with Lightroom).

Lightroom only references to your photos wherever they are. Lightroom doesn’t lock your images in any database, it just reads the photos from a location where you keep them. So any time you want to access your images with Lightroom, they’ll be where you put them when you imported images.

How to Manage Your Albums/Collections

In Aperture, when you want to gather a series of images, you create Albums. In Lightroom they’re just called Collections and they’re the same thing. What’s great about Lightroom Collections, you will find them in all Modules on the left side of your screen.

Presets

Aperture has some presets you can use, however you’re going to like this – Lightroom has loads of presets!  🙂

Versions in Aperture

If you have used Versions in Aperture, you’ll be pleased to know that in Lightroom you get a similiar feature called Virtual Copies. Virtual Copies are great, they allow you to create multiple versions of the same file (for example for a black and white version and a sepia version) without duplicating your photos. You’ll find it in Lightroom in Develop Module under Photo > Create Virtual Copy.