Apple to Cease Development of Aperture and Transition Users to Photos for OS X

Apple to Cease Development of Aperture and Transition Users to Photos for OS X
techcrunch.com

I've recently seen a few articles about startups/business ideas in the mobile/consumer photo space pointing at the problem of users not having enough storage space for photos. I guess? My perception and personal experience has been that users don't have enough ability to sort/filter the photos they already take. Digital/phone photography has allowed users to be voracious photographers...without a corresponding increase in being able to handle the information overload...it's already hard enough to pick the best photo among 5 - 10 takes, but a cognitive-chore to search through a flat-folder collection of thousands of photos with nothing more than a vague recollection of the photo's date...a wedding photographer once told me that by far, the best marketing tool he has is to produce a physical album of 50-100 photos, rather than just a PhotoDVD of thousands of photos. Theoretically, that DVD can be reproduced and sent around, and many more photos included for the client's enjoyment...but realistically, clients (and their relatives) don't find browsing through photo volumes on their OS default viewer to be engaging. Brevity in editing is important, but also, visitors to a client's living room can directly see and touch the physical photo album (and see who produced it), and that in itself is an effective marketing tool.

I guess this is a long way of saying that whatever the state of Aperture was, I hope Apple makes some innovations in photo sorting/filtering, rather than just trying to provide tools to beautify photos. I'd argue that Instagram's killer feature is how it limits the user's ability to hoard photos...once you take a photo, you are pushed into publishing it...the photo filter is a way to make you feel less self-conscious about it. After taking 100 photos with Instagram, you have 100 photos to show off in a nice web album. If you take 100 photos with just your standard phone camera app, you have 100 photos waiting to be uploaded/downloaded to iCloud into a standard file system.