Moving from Aperture to Photos

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Level 1

83 points

Moving from Aperture to Photos

I figure I have to do this eventually as Aperture hasn't been supported for so long, so I wonder if anyone has any tips about how to make Photos have similar functionality. I have Luminar, so that gives me lots of editing features from the plug in. Can anyone tell me what critical things they just can't do in Photos that they had in Aperture?

Is there any way to make the background dark when looking at photos, without going into full dark mode on my system? The light background is unappealing and one reason I have hesitated to move, although it does go dark when you edit, which is good.

I notice also that when you crop, the image zooms in so you can no longer see the area outside the crop. I don't like that because if you want to adjust the crop, you lose the ability to see the rest of the picture unless you reset it. I guess that's what you have to do, but simpler that you just see the whole image with the crop lines.

As for importing, I tried exporting a project from Aperture as a library and imported that into Photos. It worked well, but for my whole library of thousands of pics, I imagine it will take much, much longer to import. Any tips on how to do that safely?

Any thoughts or tips would be appreciated. Thanks.

Posted on Feb 10, 2019 10:42 AM

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Answer 1

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léonie

Level 10

195,071 points

Feb 10, 2019 5:06 PM in response to Cartoonguy

Can anyone tell me what critical things they just can't do in Photos that they had in Aperture?

That will be a very long list. I wrote this user tip a long time ago, but it may give you some hints: Notes on Migrating an Aperture Library fr… - Apple Community

You will be switching from a professional application with dedicated, versatile tools to a simple set of some basic tools.

What I am missing most is the ability to customize the workspace.

There are no presets for file naming or batch changing.
No Lift & Stamp tool for metadata and adjustments.
We cannot see all EXIF or IPTC metadata.
We cannot compare images side-by-side
No Star ratings or flags or color labels, and no way to display metadata with the thumbnails.
No way to compare photos side-by-side, no light-table
The support for a referenced library is very limited.
We cannot merge libraries or export partial libraries
You cannot save adjustment presets or use brushed adjustment (Luminar will help with this problem)
there is no way to name places for easy geocoding

...

You could get your self Power Photos as a second browser for Photos. It lets you change the background colorant display more metadata with the thumbnails. Even the free trial version ca display the library in a nice list view. The full, paid version allows to merge libraries. One problem with PowerPhotos is, that the first launch takes a very long time. I start it once a day and keep it open.

I am using Luminar to crops the photos to avoid the problem with the zoomed in cropping window.

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Answer 2

léonie

Level 10

195,071 points

Feb 11, 2019 2:17 AM in response to Cartoonguy

For me the most important photo editing extension (in addition to Luminar 3 for general editing and Aurora HDR for HDR development) is the External Editors for Photos extension. It allows me to pass RAW files as a Raw files to Photos or call external Editors, that are not available via the "Image > Edit With" protocol.

I am using it to call "DxO Perspective", for example. It makes it. quick and easy to correct the perspective.

Here is a collection of User Tips for Photos:

Thematic Index to Photos for Mac related … - Apple Community

We are still in the process of rewriting some user tips, after the transition of the Apple Support Communities to the new platform rendered the previous user tips unreadable by changing the format and changing the code of the AppleScripts.. The user tips with a date in 2019 have been edited to fix the formatting errors.

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Answer 3

Cartoonguy Author

Level 1

83 points

Feb 10, 2019 10:09 PM in response to léonie

Thanks so much. This is very helpful. Some of those items in your list are not too important to me, but not being able to export or merge a library is a bummer. No lift and stamp tools is also a drag, but you can do it in Luminar, so I guess that helps. I will check out Power Photos.

You have clearly moved to Photos, so I assume you felt as I do, that we have to move on from Aperture. Do you use any particular plugins you feel are really worth knowing about?

Cheers.

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Moving from Aperture to Photos

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