Apple acknowledges that Aperture won’t run on macOS 10.15 and later

Apple yesterday acknowledged that its photo management and editing software Aperture for Mac will not run in future macOS version after macOS Mojave.

The news was made official in a support document which offers step-by-step instructions detailing moving existing Aperture libraries to the stock Photos app or Adobe’s Lightroom Classic.

In June 2014, Apple announced the discontinuation of development of Aperture. Since that time, Apple has released five major macOS updates. For technical reasons, Aperture will not run in future versions of macOS after macOS Mojave. To continue working with your Aperture photo libraries, you must migrate them to the Photos app included with macOS, or migrate them to Adobe Lightroom Classic.

The company provides separate support documents detailing how Photos handles Smart Albums, metadata and keywords from iPhoto or Aperture libraries and how Smart Albums from Aperture libraries work in Photos. Adobe’s Lightroom Classic version 5.7 and later includes a built-in tool for migrating Aperture libraries to Lightroom catalogs.

The support document cautions that a migrated Aperture library retains its library organization, metadata and image adjustments in Lightroom, sans a few listed exceptions.