I just shot a wedding and spent a good deal of time rating over 3,000 images in Aperture 3.3 with the intention of handing the library over to another photographer I work with for post-production and delivery.

But then I discovered that he hasn’t upgraded to 3.3 because his Mac Pro is too old to accept it. It’s only about four years old and otherwise works just fine, so he’s not going to spend a ton of money just to upgrade Aperture quite yet.

It occurred to me that if I exported my original files (not jpegs) and selected “Include IPTC” my ratings should stick and be readable by him in in Aperture 3.2 once he imported them. I wasn’t sure about this so I did a test.

Luckily, I hadn’t made any adjustments to photos at this point because I knew that even if the IPTC metadata traveled with the original files, the adjustments would not. I thought that maybe if I exported them with “Create IPTC4XMP Sidecar File” selected, the adjustments might also show up, but a quick test proved that the Sidecar XMP does NOT include this data. However, you can select this and get the same result as using “Include IPTC” — the end result is the same; it’s just a little messier in your image folder.

If you want your IPTC to travel with your original files, select “Include IPTC.”

There is one other way as well, but it comes with a warning. It’s possible to achieve the same result by choosing “Write IPTC Metadata to Originals” from the Metadata menu. Of course, doing so comes with the (slight) possibility of corrupting your original images. This is best done if you already have them backed up.

So, if you run into this challenge, you need to know that any image adjustments you make in Aperture 3.3 will never show up in Aperture 3.2 unless you export them as JPEG.

However, if all you need is to have your IPTC (including rating) show up in Aperture 3.2, you simply need to export Originals with “Include IPTC” selected in the drop down menu in the export window.