Your photos don’t move anywhere.  They will stay wherever they are presently located be it your computer’s HD or an external HD.  What you “transfer” to Lr is a link to their location so that the Lr catalogue knows where they are.  Lr works just like aperture when applying post processing changes.  It writes instructions to the catalogue (Lr) v library (Aperture) so the software knows what to do when the image is brought up.  I did duplicate my Aperture Library.  Actually it was automatically done since I used the app ApertureExporter for Lr to transfer my photos.  It copies them to a folder you create, in my case on my external HD, and I use that as my main catalogue folder.  I have not deleted either and some of my Aperture photos (a small portion) are still managed, i.e., in the Aperture Library on my laptop HD.

I have a small portion of my Aperture photos still tied to the Aperture L:library on my laptop.  If I decide to abandon Aperture completely I will more than likely make those files referenced and move them to my external HD. Having Lr find them is easy. First you’ll notice the photos are greyed out with a ? at the top of the photo.  Just right click, choose Find Missing Folder from the pop up menu.  This will bring up a standard Open dialog. Since you already know where to sent those files, just click on the folder and click Choose and everything gets relinked.  If you are dealing with multiple folders just Commnand-Click (Ctrl-click for Pcs) on all of the folders and follow the same steps. If you think I am a Lr genius…I’m not.  If you are serious about Lr I suggest you buy Scott kelby’s “Lightroom 5 book for digital photographers.”  That’s my reference book for all things Lr through this learning curve process.

Cheers,

Florian

Thank you.

I work in Aperture with referenced original RAWs. When I move to Lr and start importing my photographs, what is imported then into Lr? Does the importer pick the originals from the finder (without any information about keywords etc) or does it look into the aperture library? What I expect is that Lr gets all the information out of the edited photographs in Aperture incl. the keywords etc. Is it correct that the importer tool does all that so that at the end I get the Lr ready with referenced photographs again; referenced to my folders in the finder as it was in Aperture?

Alex,  The RAW file stays in the Referenced Library so that is all that Lr ”sees”.  Your edited adjustments will not be transferred (“seen”) by Lr unless you bake them into a JPEG and ADD them to your Lr catalogue.  I know that Aperture Exporter for Lr will copy all of your adjusted photos as JPEGs so that Lr can see your adjustments, they will even copy any of your star rated photos.  Having not used Adobe’s transfer mechanism in Lr5, I am not completely certain as to how or if it handles this.  Keywords do transfer over in both programs, I believe.  I know for a fact that they do with AE.

Florian