After quite a bit of consideration, I’ve decided to stick with Aperture. I have high hopes for 2015!

I do, however, really enjoy Lightroom tools for certain images. I considered changing my managed library to a referenced one and sharing the masters, but I’m weary of unforeseen problems down the road, and I really like having vaults back up all my masters.

Thus, I’ve decided to export copies of my best masters from Aperture to a masters folder on an external HD in order to build a LR catalogue in parallel with my Aperture library. Then, for the LR edits I really like, I’ll export tiff or jpeg versions back into Aperture (see http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aK5XviN8aLQ).

I’d really like to have Aperture, via a smart album, AUTOMATICALLY send all of the 3-star and better images to this new masters folder I specify (I can then use the synchronize folder command in LR ever time I open it). Is there a way to do this so that I don’t have to remember which ones I’ve already exported and which ones I still need to export?

Thank you all for your advice!