Long time LR4 user, but also 20+ year mac user and heavy iOS user. For that and some other reasons, I want to move to Aperture. I have about 4,000 pics in LR, with about 25GB of pics in folders (and “Lightroom 4 Catalog Previews.Irdata” about 2.5GB).
1) I saw post re transfer from LR to Aperture, but was more than 2 years old….Any thoughts on “best way” to do this. I realize previous adjustments won't transfer, but hopefully metadata will.
2) I have iMac home (750gb SSD drive and 1TB HD, both internal), but also travel with MB Air. I understand I can create new library when traveling and just merge that into main library. Given that general workflow, any strong opinion on referenced vs managed library (have read many posts, but still not sure which to do, and would rather set it up best from the start!)…. Thanks!
There’s a sort of recent thread in the Apple forum on this (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4360217?start=0&tstart=0). This also discusses pulling metadata over.
For your second question, for what you’re doing, I think a managed workflow would be better (and easier).
Like you, I’m heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem (MBP, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV). Athough LR4’s Develop module might product a (slightly) better image given its controls, the lack of iCloud/iLife/iWork integration became the deal ender for me.
Charles- thanks much for the quick reply…. and for that thread! So I can understand better, why do you say managed would be better (from what I’ve been reading, was leaning towards referenced, but like I said, trying to do this right from the start)?
Managed vs. referenced becomes a personal preference, but when you’ve got Aperture libraries on separate computers, it becomes easier to export specific projects from your MBA and import them to the iMac when they’re managed.
Assuming all your images are raw files, one sure fire way to get all your images and their associated metadata over is to first convert them to Adobe DNG in LR4. The DNG files will contain everything about the images including all of the metadata and rating and flags you applied to them in LR4. After you create the DNG files, you can import them right into Aperture.
I had a disk drive with over 30,000 raw files in DNG format. I was a long time Adobe user and used MediaPro for cataloging these files. I imported them straight into Aperture about 15 months ago. All of the data I had applied to the images and saved in the DNG files came right over. No mess. No errors. No problems. I now keep them in a managed library in Aperture.
Feel free to reach out to me with other questions about this process.
PS: I checked out that link. I imagine the person having the problem with some metadata not coming over in their DNG files probably had not saved their metadata changes back to the DNG files. In Lightroom all associated metadata applied to an image will get written to the DNG file at the time the DNG file is created. Later change to metadata in LR is not written to the DNG file until you tell LR to do so.
Photographer | https://www.walterrowe.com | https://instagram.com/walter.rowe.photo
Thanks much Walter…. I started to import over, but I have a combination of jpeg, NEF, and a few tiff. I started running into weird behavior with keywords– after mainly creating new keywords (as with first small batch, there were none that came over), I then did an import which *did* bring over some keywords, and then some started disappearing/doubling.
In addition, one became nested, and I absolutely could not figure out how to un-nest it! (dragging as usual between 2 higher level keywords did NOT work). So…. decided to start over by trashing prefs, and from another post, discovered that this can happen with imports– that post suggested locking keywords when importing so this doesn’t happen…. Maybe it’s not an issue if ALL dng files, but seems to be a problem for me….
When you made changes to your metadata inside Lightroom, did you “Save” it back to the original files? Aperture’s import will only read the image files written to disk. It does not look inside Lightroom’s Catalog database for metadata. If you change keywords in LR, you have to tell Lightroom to update the files on disk. In Lightroom in the Library Module there is a Metadata menu. In that menu there is an option to “Save Metadata to File”. You can also simply press Command-S (Save). First select all the images in your LR catalog, then “Save” the metadata to file. Afterwards try importing the images into an empty Aperture Library and see if the metadata doesn’t come over.
Photographer | https://www.walterrowe.com | https://instagram.com/walter.rowe.photo
Yes- I actually had hit that “save metadata to file” ‘first…. At this point, decided to just create new keywords in Aperture…. I feel like I have the “luxury” of doing this, given I have “only” around 4-5K pics (and not 40K). It’s actually an opportunity to re-keyword pics (many of which I hadn’t done in years), so it will make finding pics in Aperture better.
Just working on importing folder by folder at this point…. thanks again!
A note about my experience with DNGs and Aperture - converting my Nikon NEFs & Fuji RAFs to DNG are read fine by Aperture but my Lumix RW2s from both a G2 & an older LX3 are not recognised at all & I had to re-convert to Tiff (although the original RW2s *are* readable - there’s something about the DNG conversion that Aperture doesn’t like).
If you’ve only got raw files in the NEF format then you should be OK; if you have any other raw formats, I’d check that their DNG conversion is readable by Aperture first. You might have to convert to Tiff if you want to keep the metadata intact with the file.
I still alternate between Aperture 3.4.3 & Lightroom 4.3 - each is 75% of what I want from a DAM app (but they’re a different 75% albeit with some overlap). And both show an unacceptable degree of flakiness (hangs, memory leaks, slowdowns, freezes, not playing nice with plug-ins and external editors…)
Russell
Check the Digital Camera RAW support page to see a complete list of supported cameras. A friend was disappointed to find that early Canon PowerShot models are not on the list. It was a deal breaker for him moving from Lightroom to Aperture.
Photographer | https://www.walterrowe.com | https://instagram.com/walter.rowe.photo