Alasdair Gillespie

Hello.
 
I am not sure if this is the correct forum to use and expect to be transferred to another.  I am getting more used to Affinity Photo now and find that the lack of having an ability to organise and view and tag images is discouraging.  
I have waited a few years to see if the company were going to do something about this.  
At the present it seems that the only alternative is to go down the 'free Adobe Bridge' route; nothing in life is ever free.
It took me long enough to untangle myself from the Adobe company and really do not want to get involved with them again.  
I would be happy to pay for an image cataloguing package but know little to nothing about alternatives to Adobe -  recommendations please.

I also encountered the same problem as you, it is very easy to crash, whether it is from loading a picture, creating a new pasteboard, or adding effects, it can make the photo crash.

Hi Alasdair and Welcome to the Forums,
 
You might like to do a search of the forums for DAM or Digital Asset Management, as this topic has come up a lot on the forums and many people have made suggestions of 3rd part programs to catalog/store images  

I don't want to climb into the old discussion about closed libraries vs. open folder structures. And as you already pointed out, JasperD, who are we to make Affinity staff work?
 
For the people with the hang to their own holy folder structures, I understand the "advantage" of having a transparent structure and also the anxiety against a black box. I think, I made myself clear I don't want to get the Aperture functions into Affinity photo as it wouldn't improve speed. However, I don't feel Aperture the way of a black box - it takes care about all structures and helps me finding my pictures better than on the LAN drives in the office I'm working in. And there we use Bridge, which is absolutely horrible and diskspace consuming. Folder structures have the advantage of being stable and reliable. And the disadvantage there's nothing as inflexible to organize pictures in. So, for the folder structure guys there's an easy way not to bother with a database structured DAM: Just don't buy it.
 
Aperture took me a while to get used to after I bought it 5 years ago. I had to learn about what is what and what to do with it. There are lots of things which could be improved in Aperture - or, which could be done better with another start from scratch. I don't want necessarily a closed library, but I want a performing database, a fast browser and face detection. Keywords could be done better although I doubt I would love to sit hours for tagging pictures with keywords. I think there are better ways to categorize.
 
Affinity Photo already has a RAW converter which worked pretty well at some RAWs I tried. I'd find it pretty cool having a browser in which I can make easy edits in each organisation I'm in, be it "All photos", a project, an album, a smart album, a slide-show without starting an external module. And if I need more, I hand it over to Affinity photo. Also, I prefer non-destructive changes of my pictures. Affinity already separated Photo into 4 modules - normal editor, liquify, converter and exporter. There's also a media browser - most of Aperture is already there, most of the modules will become improved. I thought I like Aperture because it's one app for everything I normally do with my pictures. But I really like it because there are no seams between the different working regions.
 
Like billtils I do have huge libraries and I don't want to reorganize all of 'em. I'm not married to Aperture, it's just my best (known) way to organize my stuff. If I can transfer those structures to something else with no hassle and if this "something else" is as easy to use (meaning, no long days in front of YouTube tutorials), I'm in.

All valid points Habakuk, but my, perhaps jaundiced, view is that Apple is not a technology seller.  It either develops it or it tries to kill it.  If Apple doesn't want to develop Aperture I can't see them letting someone else have it.  I may be wrong (I hope I am) but I think they see the future of photography as over-processed jpegs in the cloud and don't want to waste development time on software that can't run on an iPad.
 
Arguably, the current state of Logic Pro X and Final Cut X suggests otherwise, so perhaps I am wrong.  But. deep down, I believe Apple judges the value of its software by how much hardware it helps them sell.  I suspect their market research lead them to believe that very few people were ditching Windows for OS X because they wanted to use Aperture and so they judged Aperture to be a net financial loss.
 
If they let someone else have Aperture and they turned it into a success, causing the press to criticise Apple for abandoning it, (or even worse, develop it for Windows) then I don't think Apple management would be happy.