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The story of Avalanche

Starting to write our story, introducing Avalanche Beta, converting photo libraries and more….

First of all, thank you all for your patience. Some of you subscribed to our Newsletter back in December when we first started to talk about CYME. We did promise at that time that we would not spam your mailboxes with news, and in a sense, we did respect that promise. 

Today we are releasing our first Newsletter to tell you more about our projects, about our first product (Avalanche) and our roadmap. We are also giving you the opportunity to test our software and we would really value your feedback on Avalanche. Please read on to find out about what it does, what it does not yet do, and how you can help.

Avalanche was born out of our need to move massive amounts of photos from Aperture to Adobe Lightroom. We tried many different ways to achieve this and it was frustrating because it was often incredibly slow, and lots of edits were lost in the process. 

Then we started to work on CYME’s ambitious photo project and realized that the first building block was a component that would understand the inner structure of all major photo cataloging apps (Aperture, Photos, Lightroom, Luminar, CaptureOne,…). Having this component to read from and write into any catalog format, would indeed allow us to convert between them. 

So we decided to release a first product that would be that converter and gradually add more input and output formats to it. Avalanche was born…on paper.
Several months later, here we are with a first beta of Avalanche that we restricted to

Aperture -> Lightroom for now but there will be more to come!

The Avalanche Beta

  • The 1st Avalanche Beta is out now for you to try. When launching the app, you will be presented with detailed Release Notes.

What is missing from the beta

  • While the current beta can read Lightroom catalogs, there is no real export route YET from Lightroom…but this will change in the near future. The current beta is mainly targeted at migrating from Aperture to Lightroom.
  • Migration of faces information
  • Handling of Aperture’s custom WhiteBalance (Skin, Gray)
  • Migration of some toning settings
  • Support for MacOS < 10.14 is missing (see below)

System Requirements - Please Read

  • Avalanche Beta 1 requires MacOS 10.14 (Mojave) or later to run. It runs fine on Catalyna Beta (10.15) but does not run on High Sierra yet. We will make it work on HighSierra (10.13) in Beta 2 shortly. 8Gb of memory are recommended.

The Roadmap

We intend to release regular betas until the final release (early September).

Beta 2:
We expect to deliver the following features :

  • support for HighSierra
  • support for monochrome images
  • support for faces
  • better conversion of adjustments such as sharpening, noise reduction, etc….
  •  

How you can help ?

By testing Avalanche against your Aperture libraries and exporting them. You can start by working with smaller libraries to minimize waiting time and move to larger libraries.
We are interested to hear about things that go wrong : crashes (it should never happen), conversion that do not produce the expected results…. 

Please use it to send us feedback and bug reports directly from the app or by clicking on this button :

SUBMIT FEEDBACKS

Converting photo libraries

The task of converting libraries is a rather complex one because all the storage formats are proprietary and therefore undocumented. If it is often easy to understand the main concepts that were used by the engineers who created those formats, the devil is so much in the details. As a result, we cannot know in advance what are all the possible configurations that our program might encounter and it is therefore hard to predict if we will fail on any of those. This is why being exposed to a large sample of input catalogs is important, and this is where you can really help.

And Luminar?

There has been a growing demand on our web site for an export path from Aperture (or even Lightroom) to Luminar 3. We had big hopes that our starting relationship with Skylum would lead to a form of collaboration because Avalanche has a strong foundation to read and decode most information from Aperture/Photos/Lightroom : adding the export in the newly introduced Luminar 3 catalog format seemed like the easy part. We looked at the Luminar format and until now, it is unable to handle annotations, EXIF/IPTC so we decided to wait until a new version with these features is out. The good news is that such changes in Luminar are on the way and we are now busy working out a plan. We hope to be able to say more about it very soon.
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The CYME Roped Party