Come on, Apple!
Seriously? Here's the thing. I see people here writing how awesome it would be to do this or that in the field. These are people who are most certainly not full-time professional photographers. Have any of you ever tried to manage and edit a library of 100,000 images in the freaking cloud? That solution was, is, and only ever will be an option for laymen. Shooting a picture with your iPhone and doing whatever with it on another device is fine for a normal person, but a professional has no need for or desire for such a thing. My rather expensive DSLR is made to take and store pictures, which it does better than ANY other device, and transfer them for corrections, storage, enhancements, etc... The whole point of Aperture was to organize all images, locally stored, to quickly find them or group them when needed. I have never, in 20+ years, stored anything online, over the network, or in the cloud. My collection of hard drives, and their mirrors, have always been the most efficient and reliable system around. Apple is killing professionals in favor of the simple-minded general public who think photography is made of stupid pictures with "neato" filters, rather than a set of technical and creative skills learned and honed over many years.
This announcement saddens me. It not only throws us professionals out in the muck, again, it empowers the mundane and celebrates the talentless cool factor over the practical needs of one of Apple's longest supporting groups. At this rate Apple will be making the entire OS for all devices designed for an IQ level of 3, which will make all of it just useless. Like Windows.