Earlier this year I finally imported the photos I took in 2014 into Apple Aperture, just in time for Apple to retire Aperture -- theoritically to be replaced by a yet to be released "Photos for OS X" which was expected to be much more mainstream/snapshot focused than Aperture (an improved iPhoto, rather than an Aperture-level tool). Since I did not have much investment in Aperture (beyond the relatively low purchase price, and time spent getting Aperture to fit my ideas of digital asset management) -- almost no photo editing at all -- this was not the end of the world. But it did discourage me from investing any further time in migrating my photos into Apple Aperture!
Because I already subscribed to the Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Program, to rent Photoshop at a tiny fraction of the previous New Zealand retail price, and that included Lightroom, my plan was to migrate to Adobe Lightroom for at least digital asset management. However I delayed switching over because (a) importing everything from scratch again seemed a lot like hard work, and (b) the Adobe Creative Cloud tool seemed to keep forgetting that I had Lightroom installed, and offering to let me install it again, which made it harder to trust that Lightroom would continue to be available. I recently found out that Lightroom uses a different update technology, so it is "normal" for the Adobe CC tool to keep offering to "Install" it, each time a new Lightroom version comes out (seems like a terrible UI choice to me, but apparently they do plan to improve it eventually). So that just left the migration/import effort.
The process of moving from Aperture to Lightroom got simpler when Adobe released an Aperture import Plug-in for Lightroom. (There had been other guides previously, but they involved more manual steps.) So since I had some quiet time at the end of the year, I made a first attempt at converting the Aperture catalog into a Lightroom catalog.
My Aperture catalog is quite small (under 4000 photos, as I had only imported a few months of photos taken earlier this year), so the migration process ran fairly quickly. I followed Lightroom Solutions hints on moving from Aperture to Lightroom, with some simplifications and additions:
Install the Aperture Importer Plug-In for Lightroom (FTR, requires at least briefly enabling the Cloud Drive to transfer the Plug-In file).
Open Aperture and ensure:
There are no "Managed" files (ie, all "Referenced"), by filtering on "File Status: Managed" and checking there was not anything shown as "Managed".
Ensured that all "RAW+JPEG" pairs had the RAW file as the Master, by searching for "File Type: RAW+JPEG", and then selecting them all and marking the RAW file as the master.
then making sure Aperture had a backup of the catalog and closing Aperture.
Launch Lightroom, and create a new catalog in my preferred location (ie along side my photos, rather than hidden in
~/Pictures, so that it is more likely I will copy it with the photos).Relaunch Lightroom, so that the Plug-In shows as usable (not sure why but all the Plug-Ins were greyed out after first creating the new Catalog).
Open the "Import from Aperture Library..." Plug-In (File -> Plug-in Extras -> Import from Aperture Library...), and double check it found the Aperture catalogue and a sensible number of images.
Choose "Options..." and enable "Leave referenced files in your Aperture library in their current location", to avoid Lightroom creating an unnecessary/confusing/disk consuming duplicate of all the referenced files.
Verify that the extra space required has returned to zero (ie, all files are referenced, and will not be duplicated).
Start the importer, and watch it run to completion (a few minutes for under 4000 photos on a SSD drive). There are quite a few GUI updates during the import with things like flags turning on/off, but everything eventually settles down at the end of the import.
Overall I found that the import basically worked, even if the imported catalog was not as tidy as I would like. The main inconveniences I found were:
The "Folders" view ended up being pretty confused (eg, several repetitions of the same folder name) because it appeared only to pick up the innermost folder name. Right-clicking and doing "Show parent folder" a few times seems to encourage Lightroom to show enough nested folder context to make the "Folders" view useful.
All the Collections got nested under a "From Aperture" Collection Set, which caused some of the more deeply nested ones to be so deeply nested that it was not possible to make the panel big enough to see their full name. Some manual rearrangement is clearly going to be required.
It appears that there are Collection Sets created for each Aperture Project, with a "Project Photos" Collection inside that, adding to the nesting problems. That seems an unfortunate conversion choice, for instances where there are no Aperture Albums inside the projects. But some manual rearrangement should tidy that up too (eg, renaming each "Project Photos" Collection to the name of the enclosing Collection Set then moving that to a collection ouside the "From Aperture" Collection Set).
It appears that for files that were "RAW+JPEG" in Aperture, only the RAW file got imported into Lightroom (which I can live with; the JPEGs are in different -- but predictable -- directories, so I can always find them by hand if required).
Since I had not used Aperture for much beyond digital asset tracking (almost no image editing, no keywords/colours/stars/etc) I did not have much else to check beyond the number of images and folder/collection structure.
The only other Aperture feature I had used more than a trivial amount was stacks (eg, for exposure brackets) -- and the Aperture Import Plug-In decided to convert those to keywords. Despite the fact that Lightroom has a Stack feature too. As far as I can tell (from Lightroom View Keyword Tags), each stack was given its own Keyword of the form "Aperture Stack NNN" -- so I have a whole bunch of those (300+) each with exactly three photos in them. Joy.
The "Aperture Stack NNN" keyword mess will clearly take some manual cleaning up -- manually stacking the photos again because the importer did not do so, then removing the keyword clutter -- but it is not that much worse than would be required if I had imported them from scratch. The process seems to be to use the "Library Filter" to filter by each keyword, select all photos with the keyword (Cmd-A) then group them into a stack (Cmd-G), and optionally Expand the Stack again so they are all visible (S). Which is a bit repetitive, but possible to do incrementally while tidying up each collection. (Automatically stack by capture time may speed up some of this process for folders which mostly contain exposure bracket sets.)
I have not yet decided what I will do with new photos -- eg, if I will try to replicate my Aperture import process in Lightroom -- but that is at least something which can be handled incrementally, later.