[jwr]

Somewhat less philosophically: there is a huge technological problem in keeping photo archives. We entrust our photos to companies like Apple and Google with the attention span of a fruit fly — nobody seems to give any thought to long-term archival. Solutions appear and disappear within several years.

Also, all current photo library solutions are deficient and built mostly for a single flashy keynote presentation, not for managing actual photo libraries. Sharing with your family has only recently started arriving at Apple, for example. There is no good and reliable way to manage and keep metadata with your photos (like extended descriptions), and it seems everybody at Apple believes that the EXIF date in an image is the actual date that the photo was taken (apparently nobody at Apple used older digital cameras, or scanned anything from paper/film).

I was severely bitten by this approach, because I entrusted my archives to Aperture, which Apple later discontinued. I am not left with a large library which I can't migrate anywhere: first, because there is nowhere to migrate it TO, and second, because I know of no other programs that can manage photo stacks: groupings of several related images (like the front and back of a scanned paper photo, or several versions of a scan). I still don't know what to do about this library. I'm thinking about writing my own exporter that will read the Aperture sqlite database and export the pictures with all the metadata.

I thought about writing my own long-term photo archival and sharing software and making it open-source, but when I realized which particular group of lowlives this will be very useful for, it gave me pause and I'm reconsidering. Perhaps I'll write something for my own use.

[marssaxman]

It has been years since I was involved with this company, but at the time I worked there, Mylio was very much concerned with this problem:

https://mylio.com/

[sergimansilla]

Current Photos app can actually import these libraries. Click on “import” and select the aperture file. It should keep all the albums, metadata, etc.

[jwr]

Photos has no concept of a "stack" of versions.

[KolenCh]

https://cyme.io/avalanche-photo-conversion/

I haven't used it personally, but worth checking out. It supports Aperture in the past and worth checking if they still support, or if you can download an older version which supports it.

[jwr]

This looks promising! Thanks!