Yes, over the break I decided that I have to find a replacement for Aperture, so I tried some of the new apps.  I got Luminar.  Haven’t tried it yet.  Also bought Affinity Photo.  Tried it briefly.  Also bought ON1 Photo RAW 2017.  Used it enough to know it’s not going to do it.  Tried the demo of Mylio.  It got the closest, but still no go.

Not sure what to do.  I’ve never thought my workflow was that unique, but maybe it is.  I typically do a three-pass workflow.  First I go through a shoot quickly in the reverse order and reject the shots that are obviously bad.  Then I go through again in reverse order comparing the frames that are similar, looking for among other things which one is the sharpest.  Then once I’ve culled the whole shoot down to the best / sharpest shots (usually 10-50% remaining) I select the ones I want to process.

My big problem with every app I’ve tried is the second step.  I compare all of the shots of each scene at 100% magnification, arrowing between them so I can see the subtle sharpness differences.  In Aperture, it takes 4-5 seconds to render each D810 RAW frame, which is painfully slow, but at least once it renders it, it caches 3-5 of them so I can arrow among them with no rendering at all.  Only ON1 Photo RAW and Mylio have DAM support, so they’re the only options for that part of my process.  Even though ON1 claims to be a super fast RAW engine, it only is if all you want to do is look at their rendering of the entire image.  But if you zoom to 100% and go from frame to frame, it’s awful, 3x worse than Aperture or more and it doesn’t cache them.  Mylio is clearly much faster, taking only about 3/4 second to render, but it doesn’t cache the renders either, so it’s still useless to arrow back and forth between images because the rendering makes it impossible to compare them.

That leaves Aperture as the only workable solution, but it’s getting flakier and flakier with each release of MacOS.

I have at least decided to convert from using an Aperture library to relocating the images out of the Aperture library package into a referenced folder hierarchy, which will be much more likely to be compatible with whatever else I want to use.  All of those apps that I’ve purchased will work easily within that kind of setup, and they each have some attractive features.