So Apple brings out this Aperture software and at first everyone thinks it’s the consumer iPhoto or it’s a Photoshop knockoff. They think it’s too complicated to successfully be the former and too rubbish to be the later. But Adobe launches Lightroom and now with two big applications in the same area, that area becomes a market.

For some years now, if you were a professional photographer or you just fancied being one (hello) then you either bought Aperture or Lightroom for the managing of your photos.

Not any more.

As of now, Aperture is dead.

With the introduction of the new Photos app and iCloud Photo Library, enabling you to safely store all of your photos in iCloud and access them from anywhere, there will be no new development of Aperture.

When Photos for OS X ships next year, users will be able to migrate their existing Aperture libraries to Photos for OS.

That’s Apple’s official announcement. The company is also helping people move to Lightroom.

But I like Aperture. I can carry on using it but it won’t be developed further and it’s true that Lightroom has more and better features. But Aperture was a bionic iPhoto to me and I liked it. So I’m not happy at Apple’s decision.

But them’s the breaks. You invest in a piece of software – both literally and, I think more importantly, in time and effort – and the software goes away.

It’s hard.