Anyone used this app to transfer photos from Apertuer to Lightroom? It makes lots of promises. Curious to see if others have used it and your experience. I”m looking for the simplest way to do this process.
I used it to transition into Lr and it worked great for me. The only problem was that I set my JPEG conversion rating too low at 3 stars and that created a whole bunch of extra photos in the library/catalogue that in retrospect I didn’t really need. Any adjusted RAW photos in Aperture need to be “burned” as JPEGs before transfer otherwise all of the adjustments you made will be lost; they do not carry over. Actually, with AE you can convert them to TIFFs as well, if I remember correctly. So if you really like the look of the post-processed photo you need to do this. I did do a lot of pre-transfer clean up which helped and I strongly recommend that you do so. AE has very useful tips and suggestions on doing this and I even emailed them and got prompt answers to my questions. . I found tutorials by Todd Olthoff extremely useful. I chose this option over Adobe’s importer and really never regretted it.
I’ve posted some of my experiments over in Walter Rowe’s (sp?) post in the Tips area. My results were good overall… although I have not yet migrated my library.
One thing I am going to do is apply keywords to everything that have organized. For example: I’ll create smart albums for just about everything. Examples would be my ~100 defined locations. I’ll select all pictures in those smart albums and keyword them something “Location Kauai” or whatever. Similarly, I’ll do the same for ratings “Rating 4” or colors “color yellow”. etc.
That way, when I enter the twilight zone… any organization that for some reason was screwed up can be easily fixed.
As others have said, any Aperture corrections will not transfer so you need to create a new photo. From memory, it is easy to create a smart album that will capture all of the photos with corrections applied. Just burn a new JPEG or TIFF of those. If nothing else, you can see you end result and re-create the editing over in LR.
Your last paragraph leaves me a little terrified: I generally apply some level of correction to any photo that makes it into the “best” star rating of my workflow (could be three-stars for smaller projects, could be five-stars for bigger projects) This means, generally, there’s somewhere between 30-100 photos that get some kind of adjustments done on them for every project, and these are the photos that I definitely want to keep with the projects, not have separated out into a smart album. Any thoughts on this problem? I’ve been working up the nerve to start in on this project, but the idea of having to resort all of my best shots back into their albums is the kind of thing that would keep me using Aperture till the bitter, bitter end.
You do not necessarily have to create a smart album. You can keep them in the project just realize that in order to save your work when transferring each one of those adjusted photos now becomes a jpeg or a tiff (is you so chose). In Aperture they are just instructions as to what you changed in the original file and therefore really do not take up hardly any HD space. By creating a jpeg for each adjusted photo you worked on, when you make the transfer to Lr using AE, your HD spaces increases significantly. That’s why I bought a new, larger external HD and keep all my photos there rather than on my laptop (main and only computer).
Creating a smart album does not increase the size of your library. In my case, the only reason why I will create a smart album is to select all of the photos that have had any Aperture modifications applied… so I can then tag them with something like “edited in Aperture”. After tagging, the smart album will be deleted.
My objective is: once fully in lightroom, I can quickly create collections that contain my Aperture edited photos… so that I can recreate an edited photo from within LR. I am NOT planning to do this for every photo I migrate.
I do want a JPEG version of every edited photo. That way, from within Lightroom, I’ll be able to see what I chose to do in Aperture and use it as a comparison point for my LR edits.
I am using extensive tagging to capture almost all of my organizational efforts applied in Aperture, so I can recreate the same organization in LR. Unfortunately, there is no way to apply Aperture edits to LR originals… so for those, I will need to re-apply edit to some of my photos after the switch.
Thanks for the info. I guess I’m lucky in that I’ve only been learning Aperture for about a year so I don’t have too many photos where I’ve done a lot of editing. Mostly just family pictures. The ones I’ve done more on I had taken into Photoshop Elements and used some Actions. Once I saved them they went back into Aperture as Tiff files.
One of the main reasons I’ve put off switching to LR is I love how all of my photos stream between devices. I hate adding the extra step of uploading photos via Dropbox or some other app. I’ve thought about hanging onto Aperture as long as possible to see if Photos gets up to speed within the next year but there is a part of me that wants to go ahead and make the move.
Tnanks again of sharing your experience with AE. Sounds like I will definitely give it a try.
I used it to transition into Lr and it worked great for me. The only problem was that I set my JPEG conversion rating too low at 3 stars and that created a whole bunch of extra photos in the library/catalogue that in retrospect I didn’t really need. Any adjusted RAW photos in Aperture need to be “burned” as JPEGs before transfer otherwise all of the adjustments you made will be lost; they do not carry over. Actually, with AE you can convert them to TIFFs as well, if I remember correctly. So if you really like the look of the post-processed photo you need to do this. I did do a lot of pre-transfer clean up which helped and I strongly recommend that you do so. AE has very useful tips and suggestions on doing this and I even emailed them and got prompt answers to my questions. . I found tutorials by Todd Olthoff extremely useful. I chose this option over Adobe’s importer and really never regretted it.
Florian
Florian Cortese
www.fotosbyflorian.com
I’ve posted some of my experiments over in Walter Rowe’s (sp?) post in the Tips area. My results were good overall… although I have not yet migrated my library.
One thing I am going to do is apply keywords to everything that have organized. For example: I’ll create smart albums for just about everything. Examples would be my ~100 defined locations. I’ll select all pictures in those smart albums and keyword them something “Location Kauai” or whatever. Similarly, I’ll do the same for ratings “Rating 4” or colors “color yellow”. etc.
That way, when I enter the twilight zone… any organization that for some reason was screwed up can be easily fixed.
As others have said, any Aperture corrections will not transfer so you need to create a new photo. From memory, it is easy to create a smart album that will capture all of the photos with corrections applied. Just burn a new JPEG or TIFF of those. If nothing else, you can see you end result and re-create the editing over in LR.
/Jim
/Jim Pappas
Your last paragraph leaves me a little terrified: I generally apply some level of correction to any photo that makes it into the “best” star rating of my workflow (could be three-stars for smaller projects, could be five-stars for bigger projects) This means, generally, there’s somewhere between 30-100 photos that get some kind of adjustments done on them for every project, and these are the photos that I definitely want to keep with the projects, not have separated out into a smart album. Any thoughts on this problem? I’ve been working up the nerve to start in on this project, but the idea of having to resort all of my best shots back into their albums is the kind of thing that would keep me using Aperture till the bitter, bitter end.
Thanks!
You do not necessarily have to create a smart album. You can keep them in the project just realize that in order to save your work when transferring each one of those adjusted photos now becomes a jpeg or a tiff (is you so chose). In Aperture they are just instructions as to what you changed in the original file and therefore really do not take up hardly any HD space. By creating a jpeg for each adjusted photo you worked on, when you make the transfer to Lr using AE, your HD spaces increases significantly. That’s why I bought a new, larger external HD and keep all my photos there rather than on my laptop (main and only computer).
Florian Cortese
www.fotosbyflorian.com
Okay, that makes me feel slightly better. Still not great (I don’t look forward to a significant increase in my library size) but better. Thanks!
Creating a smart album does not increase the size of your library. In my case, the only reason why I will create a smart album is to select all of the photos that have had any Aperture modifications applied… so I can then tag them with something like “edited in Aperture”. After tagging, the smart album will be deleted.
My objective is: once fully in lightroom, I can quickly create collections that contain my Aperture edited photos… so that I can recreate an edited photo from within LR. I am NOT planning to do this for every photo I migrate.
I do want a JPEG version of every edited photo. That way, from within Lightroom, I’ll be able to see what I chose to do in Aperture and use it as a comparison point for my LR edits.
I am using extensive tagging to capture almost all of my organizational efforts applied in Aperture, so I can recreate the same organization in LR. Unfortunately, there is no way to apply Aperture edits to LR originals… so for those, I will need to re-apply edit to some of my photos after the switch.
/Jim
/Jim Pappas
Thanks for the info. I guess I’m lucky in that I’ve only been learning Aperture for about a year so I don’t have too many photos where I’ve done a lot of editing. Mostly just family pictures. The ones I’ve done more on I had taken into Photoshop Elements and used some Actions. Once I saved them they went back into Aperture as Tiff files.
One of the main reasons I’ve put off switching to LR is I love how all of my photos stream between devices. I hate adding the extra step of uploading photos via Dropbox or some other app. I’ve thought about hanging onto Aperture as long as possible to see if Photos gets up to speed within the next year but there is a part of me that wants to go ahead and make the move.
Tnanks again of sharing your experience with AE. Sounds like I will definitely give it a try.
Katie S.