they manage to bring back the mythical Apple professional app to forget about Adobe

For those who don’t remember it, Aperture was the Apple’s professional photo retouching app. An application that, several years ago, became part of the Photos app and stopped working on Macs. An application that, however, we can bring back, even on Apple silicon, thanks to an interesting GitHub project.

Searching for an alternative to Adobe: the resurrection of Aperture

Retroactive is a GitHub project that allows us to bring back various apps. Among them, a substitute for the Adobe suite, which is paid for by subscription and has motivated many users to look for alternatives such as Aperture. Depending on the operating system we are running we have several options. In Big Sur and Catalina we can use Aperture, iPhoto and iTunes, while in Mojave Xcode 11.7 is added and in High Sierra Final Cut Pro 7, Logic Pro 9 and iWork ’09 also appear.

Retroactive works by slightly modifying apps so that they work on the latest operating systems. Without losing sight of the fact that both Retroactive and the operating systems are regularly updated by adding and removing features, we have been able to verify that the app works on Macs with Apple silicon. Thus, although not officially, it also works properly on macOS Monterey, even in its latest versions.

There are several alternatives to the Adobe suite. We can choose Affinity Photo or Procreate Pro, for example. It is surprising, given this, how there are users willing to jump all the obstacles to recover the use of Aperture. A simple app, with a great design, powerful and capable of managing our entire photo library without requiring the payment of a monthly or annual subscription.

Aperture returns to our Mac with M1 and even macOS Monterey

This time we are going to focus on bring back Aperturea true Mac classic. Thanks to Retroactive, the steps to follow are the following:

1. We download Retroactive from this link.
2. We open the app.
3. When the system notifies us that it is one from an unidentified developer, we touch Cancel.
4. We secondary click on the app and choose To open. Now, in the dialog box, we touch To open in order to run the app. If this fails we can go to the System preferences on Privacy & Security and tap on To open.
5. we touch Unlock under Opening.
6. Retroactive will scan our Mac for the Aperture installation. If it finds it, it will jump directly to the next step, otherwise it will ask us to download it. To do this we must go to the App Store, send it to us via AirDrop from another Mac or restore it from a backup. After this we just play Continue.
7. In order to modify the original application, Retroactive requires that we give it administrator permissions. We just tap on authenticatewe write the password of the Mac and touch To accept.
8. We wait for Retroactive to apply the modifications. This process should take about two minutes.

And that’s it. Now we’ll just tap on Launch Opening to open the app. From here we can close Retroactive, since Aperture will run from the Dock or from the Applications folder like any app on our Mac.

We must bear in mind that while Aperture will work at full capacity, there are some features that will not be available. The most notable absences are video playback, photo slideshow export, use of Photo Stream, and iCloud photo sharing.

While sometimes getting everything to work, especially on the latest versions of operating systems, requires quite a bit of inventiveness, the truth is that Retroactive gives us a lot of tools to bring back certain apps. Apps that, if we look for alternatives to the Adobe suite, we can continue to enjoy on our Macs.