Retroactive: Run Aperture, iPhoto and iTunes on macOS Ventura, Monterey, Big Sur

[bombcar]

https://medium.com/@cormiertyshawn895/deep-dive-how-does-ret... goes into detail all the things needed to make this work

[howsitt]

I've read the article but some questions still remain. Does Retroactive install the shared dylibs of previous macOS releases? Or does it use an approach similar to https://www.macports.org/ ?

[manxman]

Why the heck Apple kill Aperture anyway?

[AnonHP]

Lack of interest is my guess. That plus someone in Apple imagining that it shouldn’t compete with Adobe Lightroom. Aperture, during its peak, was well liked by users. Many even liked it better than Lightroom.

Even the iPhoto of that time (on iOS) had features that Photos doesn’t have till today (I recall buying iPhoto that allowed erasing things from a photo or blurring things from a photo just by using one’s finger).

[m463]

When it first came out, I thought it was a little porky. But then machines got faster.

What I loved was that your original photos were read-only

[TheOtherHobbes]

It honestly feels like all of these problems - auto-bans by Meta and Google, enshittification of formerly-professional Apple products, nuke-your-money grabs by Ebay and Stripe - all come from a shared culture of corporate narcissism.

Not only is there no genuine empathy for users, it seems important that giant corporations should have the freedom to disappoint, manipulate, and abuse everyone, should they choose to.

[dddddaviddddd]

I'm impressed by the ingenuity of people who keep old software running just a bit longer! When Catalina first came out, I used Retroactive for iTunes. This let me get one last update out for my track joiner (https://www.davidschlachter.com/misc/trackconcat), targeting both the new Music app and iTunes.

[ggm]

speaking of "I miss old s/w" I miss Picasa. I do like Apples photo stuff, but I loved Picasa.

[korhojoa]

I miss hello. It was great, simple and fast. Then google bought picasa and it went away. :( I kept using picasa a long time after it was no longer updated, but there wasn't a good hello alternative. http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/05/picasas-hello-disco...

[AnonHP]

Seems like this is restricted to a few Apple applications. Is there something more generic to run older software? There was a “Swiss Army Knife” application for handling media files (mainly audio and photos? I forget) called Media Rage, by Chaotic Software. The company seems to have gone out of business (the domain is now parked with ads). Since Media Rage was 32-bit, it wouldn’t work from macOS Catalina.

An old article about a Media Rage update on Mac World: https://www.macworld.com/article/175779/mediarage19.html

[wiredfool]

I’d love to see this for Lightroom, as The last perpetually licensed version is stuck on 32 bit. I’ve got an old machine (just) for it now, but it would be nice to run it on hardware made this decade.

[yborg]

So if I already converted to Apple Music and load an iTunes legacy version, will this have to duplicate the Music library?

[Sporktacular]

Can this application be removed after say Aperture is working, or do it have to stay installed?

Also, does it produce a new application package that can be installed on other computers that doesn't have Retroactive installed, or is Retroactive needed on each target machine?

[Sporktacular]

Anyone had luck getting these apps running on macOS 14/Sonoma?

[moribvndvs]

Side topic: I wish macOS would stick to just numbers in their os updates to make it drop dead easy to recall which update and how old one is. I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of Californian geography and even if I did, that doesn’t help me remember what Big Sur was vs. Catalina

[Klonoar]

...except every OS update does have a number?

In tech circles I try to use the actual OS release number whenever I can for this reason.

[labster]

Even living in one of the cities doesn’t help me. They used to go west to east, but now the OS codenames have no pattern.

[ClassyJacket]

Same. From that headline I have no way of telling which is the oldest and which is the newest. Just put a damn number.

[baggy_trough]

Yes and the number should match the iOS release of the same vintage.

[paulryanrogers]

Even better they could use the year, like Ubuntu

[davidthewatson]

There should be an ACM award for retro-computing like this. I miss Aperture so much that it's difficult to express.

I dislike photo editing deeply, but for some reason, the Aperture design just made sense to me, being a person who could never grok photoshop.

[jdyyc]

I don't dislike photo editing necessarily but I miss Aperture.

I've never been in to photo editing and whatnot but when Aperture came out I decided to spend time learning it, organizing my library, tagging things and figuring all that stuff out.

I invested a lot of time and even bought some ebooks and whatnot to learn it better.

Then the EOL'd it and I just have never recovered. I have to sit down and spend time learning Lightroom, redoing all my libary and reworking my storage.... and I just have never had the desire to do it. Many of my photos are sitting in an old Aperture library tar'd up on my NAS.

[sbuk]

Have a look at RAW Power from Gentleman Coders. It's the closest thing I've found to Aperture. https://www.gentlemencoders.com

[alsetmusic]

I’m curious how it performs on modern hardware. When it was new (1.0) it was dog slow on the fastest tower Apple sold. I bet it’s very usable now by comparison.

[Xerox9213]

I’m curious if you tried Lightroom.

[TimTheTinker]

For a while in the 2000s, it seemed like Apple really had something special going. FCP, DVD Studio Pro, Motion, Aperture, Shake, Logic, XSan, XServe. Even their iLife and iWork suites used to compete with mainstream productivity apps. Now they've been really dumbed down.

What in the world happened?

(At least we have DaVinci Resolve now... but it just doesn't have the finesse that Apple pro apps once had.)

[worthless-trash]

Apple moved focus to mobile. Found mad cash money there to be made and neglected their existing ecosystem.

[seec]

Greed happened. Apple is run by someone who thinks that if something doesn't make a billion dollar it is not worth doing. At the moment where Apple had the most money to finance many things that don't make that much money or new experimental stuff they just stopped spending any money. All in the name of the shareholders.

And peoples mostly talk about the annoying front-end stuff that has been removed or neglected but if you look at all the small things that you could find on a Mac it's really sad.

This is exactly why I now say that Apple is not worth it nowadays. The hardware is nice sure, but there is plenty of nice hardware provided you are willing to pay the price. The software is becoming terrible quicker than ever and it already is a poor copy of what it was before (the way they "remade" the iWork suite is almost criminal).

[basisword]

iLife was the reason I bought a Mac. I dreamed of getting one for years as a kid specifically for that software suite. The web creator product in iLife was really fun, letting you publish your own good looking websites with zero know-how.

[artdigital]

Logic, FCPX and Motion are still extremely good and pro-grade. Numbers is all right.

[heavyset_go]

They want your subscription money.

[canbus]

https://www.darktable.org/ is a great RAW editing software which runs on macOS