Apple to end development of Aperture, its pro photo-editing software

Apple has ceased development of Aperture, its photo-editing program for professional users and amateur enthusiasts.

The Cupertino, Calif., tech giant said it would instead focus on the upcoming Photos for OS X announced earlier this month that will replace its consumer-level iPhoto program.

“With the introduction of the new Photos app and iCloud Photo Library ... there will be no new development of Aperture,” Apple said in a statement provided Friday to the Loop, a tech news site. “When Photos for OS X ships next year, users will be able to migrate their existing Aperture libraries to Photos for OS.”

Aperture has been around since 2005, but Adobe’s ecosystem of cloud-based programs, including Lightroom and Photoshop, proved more popular. Aperture was criticized for lagging behind Lightroom on upgrades.

Apple’s decision to discontinue work on Aperture is a sign that the company is bowing out of the pro photo market to focus on software for the general user, said Mike McGuire, an analyst who covers Apple for Gartner.

“With [Apple] it’s more about which cloud tools enable consumers to manage and edit their various types of content,” McGuire said. “They probably decided that their internal resources were better used on other products.”

Apple unveiled the new Photos for OS software in early June at its annual developers conference. The program, which will launch in 2015, will work in sync with the Photos app on the iPhone and iPad. Together, the apps will share photos users take across all of their Apple devices. Photos for OS is also expected to give users more features than iPhoto.

Despite leaving the pro photo-editing arena, Apple assured users that it was fully committed to Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro, its professional audio and video editing software, respectively.

Follow @sal19 for the latest tech news