Migrating an Aperture Library to Photos as a new Library is no longer supported on macOS 13 Ventura

by: léonie

Last modified: Oct 29, 2022 11:36 PM

8 839 Last modified Oct 29, 2022 11:36 PM

If you still have old Aperture Libraries that need to be migrated to another application, you'd better get it done before you install macOS 13 Ventura.

Earlier versions of Photos allowed us to open an Aperture Library in Photos and Photos would create a new Photos Library from the Aperture Library. The new Library would have a similar structure as the old Aperture Library, preserving the album and the keywords.

This is no longer possible in Photos 8 on macOS 13 Ventura. When we try to open an Aperture Library in Photos we will get a warning and can only quit.

The only way to access the photos and videos in the Aperture Library is to import the photos from the Aperture Library into the Photos Library. This will only import the photos, but not the albums and not all keywords, only the keywords embedded in the originals, and only the originals will be imported, not the edited versions.

To save your work you have done in Aperture be sure to migrate the aperture libraries while still running a system version where Photos can migrate the libraries, not just the photos and videos.

The best system version to do the migration would have been macOS 10.14 Mojave. Photos 4 on Mojave has already been much better than the first version of Photos, and Mojave still supported legacy media and we could run Aperture and Photos at the same time to be able to compare the resulting library to the original Aperture Library. And Photos 4 would preserve the original filenames inside the Fotos Library package. And we could run Aperture to create high resolution previews of the edited versions, so our Aperture adjustments could be migrated in a high quality.

On macOS 10.15 Catalina to macOS 12 Monterey we could at least still open the Aperture Libraries in Photos and save the albums, but no longer run Aperture to create previews or deal with videos images in a legacy format.

But now on Ventura we can only import the original photos from our Aperture libraries.

The import from a large Aperture Library will take a very long time. Photos will present all new photos as a long list, and need a very large amount of free storage to be able to do this.

If you still need to save Aperture libraries you'd better get it done before you upgrade to Ventura.