After Apple discontinued their Aperture photo software, Adobe promised to deliver a plugin for their competing "Lightroom" product that would allow you to import your Aperture library into Lightroom.

Thanks, Adobe!

Yesterday the plugin was finally released.

Thanks, Adobe!

Today I spent just over five hours performing the import. Only to find that -zero- photos had actually been imported.

Thanks, Adobe!

To mourn the passage of Apple's Aperture photography cataloging and editing software, there was a discussion thread where people are posting the first photo they ever imported into the program.

Aperture was released in 2005, but the first photos I imported were those I took after having gone 100% digital in 2000. Up until that point, I always took a film camera with me on my travels because I wanted to make sure I had a reliable fallback in case the digital photos turned out horrible (which they often did back then).

But then the Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-D700 camera was released. Suddenly I had an unbelievable 2.8 megapixel sensor that could produce dazzling 2048 × 1360 pixel images. Sure that's less than half of what you can get out of a good DSLR today and the quality wasn't that great... but, for the time, it was pretty remarkable. Suddenly I didn't feel the need to drag my film camera around with me. On a trip to Asia I took in October 2000, I was digital only.

And here's the first photo from that batch to be imported into Aperture...

That's a picture of Akihabara Denki Gai ("Akihabara Electric Town") in Tokyo, Japan.

Today I shoot in RAW format and take three bracketed exposures for every image. That eats up a hefty chunk of memory but, with 32GB and 64GB SD cards so common (and getting cheaper every day), it's not a big deal. Back in 2000, however, I was constantly switching between Medium Quality (1600 × 1200 or 1.9 MP) and High Quality (2048 × 1360 or 2.8 MP) to save precious space on my 8MB Sony Memory Stick. The above image was shot as 1600 × 1200. Looking back, that was a bad choice because all the straight lines in the image are pixelating quite badly at such low resolution. I should have taken a second to analyze the scene and then selected High Quality mode. But, who knows what I was thinking when I shot it? Maybe I thought that a random street scene wasn't important enough to merit the extra space.

As for Aperture?

Now that it's been discontinued, I've resigned myself to the fact that my last import into the program will be my upcoming trip to Salt Lake City. After that I'll be switching to Adobe Lightroom.

If I'm feeling nostalgic, maybe I'll be sure that the first image I import into Lightroom will be the same first image I imported into Aperture.