8 Replies Latest reply: Jan 11, 2012 7:54 AM by oldbalddude RSS

    Aperture 3 to Lightroom

    oldbalddude Community Member

      I would purely love to migrate from Aperture 3 to lightroom, but from what I find here, the olnly thing that I can clunkily migrate is masters. I've got 50,000 images in Aperture most of which have Photoshop edits as well as Aperture edits. Aperture just flat doesn't cut it, but there doesn't appear to be a way to get out of it, without maintaining two libraries, one in Aperture for the old stuff and one in Lightroom for new stuff. Unfortunately, that really doesn't cut it for me either. Surely someone has come up with a relatively seamless way  to allow users who guessed wrong in the beginning to rectify their errors.

        • 1. Re: Aperture 3 to Lightroom
          Victoria_Bampton CommunityMVP

          Lightroom will never understand Aperture's edits unless you render them to TIFF or suchlike.  You should be able to extract your masters and export rendered copies of the edited files, and import the whole lot into LR.  That said, I'd hold off until the final release, whatever you decide.

          • 2. Re: Aperture 3 to Lightroom
            oldbalddude Community Member

            The final edits are almost all TIFFs, Jepgs, or Photoshop documents. What I am most concerned about is maintaining the connection between unedited originals and the final edits without having to manually stack them as that would be far too time consuming with 50,000 images (closer to 100,000 if you count both original and edited version). But maintaining that connection, keywording and metadata is really important. I keep hoping I am missing something in the stuff I have read, but fear I am not, and if I am not, I'm stuck with Aperture.

            • 3. Re: Aperture 3 to Lightroom
              Victoria_Bampton CommunityMVP

              Auto Stack by 0 second capture time should work for stacking I think.  Certainly worth a good go, but wait till the final release before you move existing stuff over.  There will be a 30 day trial of the final version so you'll be able to give it a good workout.

              • 4. Re: Aperture 3 to Lightroom
                Shawn T. Moore Community Member

                I would avoid  moving over to LR till the Beta is over and LR4 is out for a month.  Beta means Just that beta no guarantee. I am still running my main LRCat ( Over 460,000 Images) on LR3 and I am Using the Beta at Home.  Use the beta to learn LR

                • 5. Re: Aperture 3 to Lightroom
                  oldbalddude Community Member

                  Would definitely not move until 4 is final (or I would move to 3, experiment with 4 and upgrade later), but need to know if there is a practical way to do it at all. I'm working with Apple's engineering people to try to work out some of the issues I have with Aperture, but frankly I'm not optomistic. They tend to ask a lot of questions, but provide zero feedback. I'm getting tired of it.

                  • 6. Re: Aperture 3 to Lightroom
                    Victoria_Bampton CommunityMVP

                    oldbalddude wrote:

                     

                    but need to know if there is a practical way to do it at all.

                     

                    Send me an email to victoria@lightroomqueen.com and I'll email you full transfer instructions once LR4's released, ok?

                    • 7. Re: Aperture 3 to Lightroom
                      john beardsworth Community Member

                      Under Lightroom 3 there are already a couple of practical ways to migrate. With each, you can preserve all your keywords and other IPTC data, even to some extent your project and album structure, but Lightroom 3 can't understand Aperture's adjustments so the images will appear unadjusted. You can read more here. That said, it's probably best to use LR4 Beta for new work, gain familiarity with it, and move after full release.

                      • 8. Re: Aperture 3 to Lightroom
                        oldbalddude Community Member

                        OK, with the info you folks have provided, it looks like there may be a route that has a chance of meeting my needs. I'm really not concerned about preserving Aperture edits, though I am concerned about keeping relationships between externaly edited files and Masters. That's my real hangup. Maintaining the project structure also matters, but not as much. I think, I'll download the LR4 beta today and as I have plenty of disk space to spare I'll mess with both for a while. I have no actual experience with the Relocate Masters command, so I'm not totally sure what it will do, but hopefully it's more than the name of the command suggests. I have a dummy Aperture library (or whatever Aperture calls it) that I used for testing before I moved everything into Aperture. I'll add some stuff to that and use it for testing to see if this process floats my boat. I guess my real question was "Is it worth the time and effort it will take to make this transition?" From the answers I have here, it looks like it may well be worth a shot, and it shouldn't take an excessive amount of time to find out for sure. I already know that I woul very much prefer working in LightRoom, but I don't have the time available for a lengthy reorganization of the system. And running two side by side systems (one for old stuff and one for new) has so many downsides I don't want to even think about it. Any way you slice it, it's going to be ugly, but maybe not as ugly as I had feared. Thanks muchly for the suggestions. We'll see how much of a mess I can make of it shortly.