(This post is from an email conversation with a friend. I thought the content might be useful for others.)
TL;DR – Last paragraph
I have posted over the last few years about my disappointment with Aperture’s looming demise and the lack of alternatives, especially a good DAM. I purchased every single app, even though most don’t even have any DAM capabilities at all, hoping there would be a hidden gem somewhere. But no. My primary requirements were: good, solid DAM capabilities (stars, keywords, option for referenced images, organization, reliability, ease of use), non-modal (sorry, Lightroom), full-size RAW render caching, and solid editing and/or a good plug-in architecture. The winner: Aperture.
Second (distant) place: Capture One.
Since Aperture couldn’t read D850 RAWs, I had to do something, so in May 2018 I made the jump with C1 v11, which left a lot to be desired, but managed to check the key boxes.
In December 2018 I was forced to purchase v12 so I could get RAW support for the Nikon Z7, which took over 3 months for Phase One to ship.
The early versions of C1 v12 were pretty buggy, the worst being a serious memory leak that would take macOS down if you didn’t restart C1 pretty often. But with 12.0.3 and later that seems to be fixed. I described the user experience in v12.0 as death by a thousand paper cuts. It was so close to good, but there were all those little things that weren’t quite right. 12.1 is out now and has improved the user experience and squashed more bugs. I haven’t yet determined if the reliability issues with DAM I have experienced from the beginning have been fixed. (BTW, the unreliability has not resulted in any data loss, just organizational malfunctions.)
As a point of reference, my main library (about 33k images – I keep it pretty tidy) takes less than 20 seconds to open now, as opposed to a minute or more before 12.1.
In C1’s favor I will say that my images look significantly better when I’m finished with them than they did in Aperture.
My workflow:
Since my photographic activities typically center around travel and my laptop cannot hold my entire library, my workflow begins with a new library on the laptop (referenced, but local) into which I load the new images each night as a part of my daily backup process. By the end of the trip I have all of the images in C1 and will have been able to lightly cull them and find a few obvious keepers as time permitted, often on the flight home. Once home I spend whatever time I can find to finish culling the images, bubble up the best, and edit those (usually less than 5%). Once that’s all done, I import that small library into my main library.
My main library lives on my laptop, but references images stored on a larger RAID system at my desk. That setup allows me to view and edit (but not export or print) my entire library in offline mode while I’m on the road. The issues I’ve had with DAM reliability have been with that step of folding the new small library into the larger. So far, that hasn’t gone perfectly a single time. As I am just about finished with my last trip’s images, I’ll find out soon if 12.1 improves that process.
Summary: Capture One is to me the closest full-feature replacement for Aperture, and doesn’t take a huge learning curve. It offers the most promise, though it’s not all the way there yet. Would I recommended it? Not pre-v12.0.3. Now? Yes, it’s livable and my final images are better using it.