Aperture Migration Plan
Incidentally, while developing this plan I tried out my copy of Aperture Exporter. It didn’t go well. AE creates keywords in Aperture for things like image-album relationships; in my case that resulted in very large numbers of keywords. Probably more than Aperture was ever tested to handle, more than enough to prove the UI doesn’t handle scrolling. If I use AE on the future it will be with a temporary copy of my Library, not the original.
I found Aperture Exporter essential in my migration to Lightroom. This is because Aperture’s own export doesn’t preserve the folder structure. Lightroom’s Aperture importer brings in your low-quality previews—I don’t even have previews, to save disk space—and also doesn’t preserve the hierarchy. Lightroom’s importer is based on PySQLite and feels more like a script than a part of the application; it can’t be canceled.
Aperture Exporter preserves a lot more metadata, but keyword explosion is definitely something to watch out for. I ended up exporting my library into five sub-libraries (that share the same masters). That way, the extra keywords didn’t affect anything in Aperture if I needed to use it again. And dividing the library made the exporting more manageable because Aperture Exporter likes to operate on a whole library.
There were some issues:
- Aperture kept pausing the export process when creating the sub-libraries. I was able to resume it from the Activity window.
- Some of the sub-libraries ended up with missing files (as found by its own verifier) even though the masters were in the correct location on disk, and they were not missing in the main library. An Aperture bug, I guess. It was easy to reconnect them. There were also some missing images that I couldn’t find at all. These seemed to all be the original from the edited/original paired images imported from iPhoto long ago.
- I ended up with copies of a few keywords, with the duplicate keyword promoted to the top of the hierarchy. Again, this only happened for very old photos that were originally in iPhoto.
- Aperture Exporter changes “.” in project names to “-”, apparently to work around a bug in Aperture’s own exporter.
- Aperture Exporter tried and failed to generate JPEGs from some .3gp movie files. The developer said this will be fixed.
