- October 2005Apple announces Aperture at $499, a raw workflow application for professional photographers. It needs a powerful Mac to run well, and early reviews say so.
- 2006Aperture 1.5 lets photographers keep their files outside the library, answering the biggest complaint about version one.
- 2007The Aperture Users Professional Network forms and starts running training, including the Road Tour.
- February 2008Aperture 2 arrives with Quick Preview, a new interface and retouching tools, at a much lower price of $199. The Road Tour is rewritten around it.
- February 2010Aperture 3 adds Faces, Places and brush-based adjustments.
- January 2011Aperture goes on sale in the new Mac App Store for $79.99.
- June 2014Apple says development of Aperture will end once its new Photos app ships.
- 2015Photos for OS X arrives, and Apple points Aperture users to it.
- 2019macOS Catalina ships. Aperture doesn't run on it or on any later release.
Why it had fans
Aperture treated a photographer's whole collection as one library, and editing as a set of instructions that never touched the original. Both ideas are standard now. In 2005 they were a different way of working, and the people who adopted them early tended to be evangelists. User groups, forums and classes like the Road Tour grew up around the software because its users wanted to get more out of it.
It also looked and felt like an Apple product, with a dark interface, the Loupe, and a Light Table that behaved like a real one. For photographers already working on Macs it fitted in a way cross-platform tools didn't.
What happened to the libraries
When development ended, Apple recommended moving to Photos, and Adobe and Phase One both offered ways to bring Aperture libraries into Lightroom and Capture One. Photographers who had kept their files referenced, outside the library, generally had the easiest move. The lesson from the archiving session applied to the software itself.