Hi! I am an amateur photographer that focuses on friends and family more than anything. For the last few years I have been using Lightroom 4 to organize and edit all my photos. However, as many people have stated, LR is not a great photo organizer. I have no problems with the editing capabilities, as there is more in LR than I even need. Aperture, on the other hand, appears to be great at photo organizing and overall keeping things in sync with all my Apple devices. Those 2 things are what matter most to me. So, here’s my question that I haven’t been able to find an answer to anywhere else:
How do I switch my entire LR4 library of nearly 33,000 photos to Aperture AND not lose my edits/metadata? Is it possible? If so, I am looking for step-by-step guidance. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated! Thanks!
Sadly Aperture cannot read Lightroom’s edits (nor can Lightroom read Aperture’s). Your basic metadata will come with the photos.
Bob
Bob
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Bob Rockefeller
Midway, GA
www.bobrockefeller.com
Bob is right. I took this journey a couple of years ago. All your metadata can come over if you save it to your files in Lightroom. All your adjustments will be lost. You may want to consider keeping Lightroom for your existing stuff and just using Aperture for your new work. I am still not finished with adjustments to all of the images I brought over from LR.
Photographer | https://www.walterrowe.com | https://instagram.com/walter.rowe.photo
As someone who also migrated to Aperture from Lightroom in the past year, I agree with Walter. I think you will be better off using Lr to deal with legacy images, and use Aperture for all your new shoots/projects.
I have well over 200,000 images processed in Lr. If I get an order for images originally processed in Lr, I use Lr to fulfill those orders.
If there comes a time when and if I can no longer use my current version of Lr, I will then import the legacy images processed in Lr into Aperture as needed.
I really do not want to import and re-process all those images in Aperture if I don’t really need to.
Just curious. When you process a RAW file in LR, you have a TIFF/JPEG/DNG image. Can those be exported to a file on the desktop and then imported to AP? (Probably not the DNG but JPEGS are JPEGS no?)
So you could keep all the RAW images on file with a copy of LR on an EHD and go back to those as needed, but have a library of the processed images on AP.
Stan
sbysshe.smugmug.com
Aperture can ingest DNG files. All my LR files were DNG format. That actually helped insure that all my metadata got moved over. I made sure LR had written all its data back to the DNG files. I was then able to import them all into Aperture. That said, knowing what I now know, I probably would leave all my LR files in LR and just start new with Aperture.
Photographer | https://www.walterrowe.com | https://instagram.com/walter.rowe.photo
Wow! I find this hard to believe. You would think that Apple would develop some sort of import method if they want to see more people switch. Thanks for the input. I really want all my photos together. I’m a bit of an organization freak. So I could export all my processed LR images and then import them into Aperture and since I exported the processed images as new files it should import to Aperture processed, right?
“You would think that Apple would develop some sort of import method if they want to see more people switch.”
Not really. Adobe does not have an import method that includes RAW processing performed in Aperture either. Or for any other RAW processing application for that matter.
The two applications perform those tasks quite differently. For the developers, it would be a herculean task to offer such a feature because they would have to reverse engineer the competitor’s software ad infinitum. Far more effort than the benefit that would be received in selling an $80 app. Granted. Apple has deep pockets, but not so deep to spend money unwisely.
Apple could take the Capture One approach and just transfer Lightroom’s important settings such as exposure, white balance, and metadata. That alone would be a huge timesaver.
If one had the inclination and technical prowess to do so, I imagine they could make a tidy sum by manufacturing a piece of software that could translate between various packages. Imagine a package built on the SDKs for Adobe Camera Raw, Apple Digital Camera RAW, CaptureOne’s toolset, etc.
The user selects source files and desired target software. Put in some smarts in the converter that detects the source file’s software and leverage that software package’s SDK to read the raw file. Do some intelligent massaging of the settings into some “independent” metric, then translate that into the target software’s metrics and use the target software package’s SDK to write out the output file.
How many software makers do you think would put up road blocks to that?
Photographer | https://www.walterrowe.com | https://instagram.com/walter.rowe.photo
That is what I had in mind. You would have access to the old processed images in your AP library(s) but have all your LR work segregated to an EHD. Then have everything from here on out filed and processed on AP.
Stan
sbysshe.smugmug.com
Hi There,
I made gigantic transfer from Nikon Capture NX2 to Aperture last year
I was warned about the loss of edits with the transfer so I left all the originals on their drives and created new external HHD formatted for the iMac, Just imported what I needed at the time and re-edited them. The files I needed that had a huge amount of edits like control points for various tasks, I just converted to tiff files which Aperture handled very well, except for size but the volume wasn’t there to cause a huge problem
When I imported from the old system edits, naturally, I just ended with the unedited file, I tried to import groups from the same shoot, edited one image and just “stamped” those edits on the rest
It has been a long process, but now I’m on top of it, as I suggested, keep the old drives and establish new ones for the change and just import the amount you need at the time and work on the rest at your leisure
Edit: I must say, Joseph’s video, “Work like a pro in Aperture 3” made the transition very easy and also, starting the filing system the right way from the start!
….Gary
I have a photographic memory but never got it developed