Apple will no longer develop Aperture or iPhoto, OS X Yosemite Photos app to serve as replacement

Image via TechCrunch.

Apple on Friday revealed that development on Aperture, its professional-grade photo editing application, has ceased, leaving Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro as its only remaining flagship pro-oriented Mac apps.

The news was broken to Jim Dalrymple of The Loop, who also revealed that iPhoto, Apple's consumer-level photo app, will be discontinued as well.

Both applications are due to be replaced by Apple's forthcoming Photos application, which will be included with iOS 8 and eventually bundled with OS X Yosemite, although the Mac version isn't set to launch until early 2015.

Apple did make it clear that development of Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro will continue.

"With the introduction of the new Photos app and iCloud Photo Library, enabling you to safely store all of your photos in iCloud and access them from anywhere, there will be no new development of Aperture," said Apple in its statement. "When Photos for OS X ships next year, users will be able to migrate their existing Aperture libraries to Photos for OS X."

The company also said in a statement to TechCrunch that it will provide compatibility updates to Aperture, allowing it to run on OS X Yosemite. However, further support will not exist after that.

Apple also said it is working with Adobe to help users transition to its Lightroom app for Mac.

Included with the reports was a new picture of the OS X Photos application, as seen above. From the picture, it would appear that the application has a "prosumer" layout. The app is also shown with a darker user interface, which is different from the predominantly white app shown off at the Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this month, as shown below.

Aperture hasn't seen a major update since 2010, when version 3.0 of the suite launched with 64-bit support, along with "Faces" and "Places" for sorting pictures. Its chief competitor for professional photographers is Adobe's Lightroom.

As for iPhoto, its last major update came in 2011, as part of the iLife '11 suite release. iPhoto also debuted on the iPad in 2012, and later came to Apple's iPhone for more advanced photo editing on the go.