I mistakenly launched Photos on my desktop iMac. Now I have some photos appearing there. Not many, a few hundred. Not sure how to ask the question: Do photos that appear in ‘Photos’ for OS X also continue to appear in Aperture? Or, do I need to move these photos from Photos to Aperture. I don’t use Photos for OS X yet. I am trying to stick with Aperture as long as possible. I just want to know if I accidentally created a whole new photo ‘library’.
Thank you!
AJ
Jan 2016
AJ,
When you open Photos for OS X the first time it asks whether you want to convert an Aperture or iPhoto library to the Photos format. I assume that’s what you did.
When you convert a library, it appears in the Finder as if a complete duplicate library is created with the same photos thereby taking up twice the space. But it’s a trick. The original photos are actually not duplicated but shared - with each library pointing to the same photo data. There is some library overhead that takes up more space.
Although the photos data is being shared, it is treated as if there are separate photos and so if you delete from one library, it won’t delete from the other.
Once the library is converted, a change made in the Aperture library will not be duplicated in the Photos library. And vice-versa. So if you’re not yet ready to use Photos it might be wise to remove the new converted library and wait until you wish to make the final transition. When you then convert your Aperture library to Photos, it will contain all the changes/edits you have made up to that point.
But be careful when deleting any library. Make sure you are deleting the correct library. And PLEASE have a current backup on another hard drive first. You should have that anyway.
Thomas
Thank you. I believe I understand. If I may, I would like to continue the discussion and give you a bit more info.
I did not ‘convert’. But, if I did it was accidental. The photos Library only contains a few hundred pictures. Aperture contains thousands. So, I took a wild guess and assumed that on one particular occasion I connected my iPhone and Photos launched and instead of ‘X-ing’ out of Photos, I clicked on the ‘Get Started’ button. Now, I am still wondering if those couple hundred pictures reside with Photos or Aperture. Am I correct in assuming, that they could reside in 2 Libraries, Aperture and Photos?
Just trying to learn… thanks for being patient.
AJ
A Raabe