A few years ago, I switched from a Mac to a PC–everything except my image library, which remains on my old Mac. I have thousands of images with manually added “Places” information and Captions/Descriptions (added in iPhoto and, more recently, Aperture). I want to complete my transition to the PC by moving my images and have been trying to figure out the best way to do it with all of the metadata intact and ready for a different image management program on the PC.

One method is to export the images from iPhoto and check the boxes that save the Places and Description metadata to the resulting files. However, I would rather not have iPhoto recompress all of my images just to add the metadata. I know this probably has been asked a few times before, but is there a way to accomplish this seemingly basic and critical task? I tried playing around with “Write IPTC Metadata to Master” in Aperture, but it does not seem to add the manually added Places information.