Does anyone use Apple's Photos program for DAM?
Good news may be on the way, for those that appreciated Aperture for it's DAM as well as its RAW processing.
Nik Bhatt, ex-lead of Aperture, quietly launched RAW Power a couple of years back. (Excellent app). This year's Apple Developers conference may have set him on course to build Aperture like DAM features into RAW Power. Basically, Apple have opened up access for developers, to Photos' database. Seems to me that this could have pretty wide implications for Apple's image handling. Photos' Extensions were already interesting, but largely useless to pros, because you had to use Photos. So ... *perhaps* this move will mean that you store your images in Photos *but* you don't have to actually use Photos at all.
However, should you want to access an image in Photos, in order to use an Extension ... well ... you can. There are 2 types of Extension. Image editing and 'Services' like photo books.
The really interesting part for Aperture users that appreciated its superb DAM, is that Nik could be providing a way forward for them. Photos can read and convert Aperture Libraries. It also retains metadata, even if Photos doesn't support it. It's in there, you just can't edit/add to it. So it could be that you convert an Aperture Library to Photos, which will retain all info and then, with an app like RAW Power, continue to operate in pretty much the same way that you did in Aperture (especially as Nik has retained the essence of the Aperture UI for RAW Power ... with one big exception ... he explains really well what all the tools do!)
To be honest, I don't think there can be anyone better than Nik Bhatt to do this. He knows this stuff inside out and has shown himself to have a very methodical approach (not much of a surprise for a lead engineer at Apple). The first iteration will probably have star ratings according to what he's hinted on Twitter. Personally, for the DAM, there are not all that many things that are essential to me, so I'm hopeful they'll all get in there. Photos already 'sort of' caters to Aperture's excellent, but very misunderstood, Managed/Referenced feature and *I think* that part of the advantage of the APFS file system that Apple recently switched to, is that an app like Photos, won't loose files that have been moved. It keeps track. (Of course, this is good for any app including Lr). At the moment, Photos will let you use Referenced images, but will not 'move' the actual images when Consolidating them into the Photos Library, instead it makes a copy and also, you can't choose to move images which are Managed in the Photos library, out of it, to be Referenced.
Anyway ... very exciting for those of us who tried and didn't like Lr for DAM, so stuck with Aperture, only to find that although it is 64bit, it's not going to run in 10.15 Catalina. We may just get saved at the last gasp.
Maybe give him some encouragement on Twitter?
https://twitter.com/gentcoders/status/1138551424051138560https://gentlemencoders.com