Can the Aperture librbary be deleted after migration to Photos?

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Can the Aperture librbary be deleted after migration to Photos?

Moving to Catalina necessitated that I migrate from Aperture to Photos. (Most unfortunately.)

Now that I've done so, can my Aperture Library be removed? Did Photos take its own copies of the Aperture library, or is Photos relying on the Aperture library for the content in there? Searching the Photos library for a given image name (eg: DSC_XXXX.*) doesn't produce anything useful, as Photos seems to rename image files with a UUID. Both 'Aperture Library.migratedaplibrary' and 'Photos Library.photoslibrary' are of similar size, so I'm hoping that I can remove the former and reclaim a sizeable amount of disk.

I'm guessing that 'Photos Library.photoslibrary/database/Photos.sqlite' might contain an answer, but I thought I'd query the hive mind first. Responses appreciated.

Posted on Nov 2, 2020 1:19 PM

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Answer 1

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Yer_Man

Level 10

165,912 points

Nov 2, 2020 3:34 PM in response to mbonnet

Yes, if you're happy that the migration has gone correctly, you can delete the Aperture library. No, your original images will not be deleted.

You won't get back as much space as you expect, because the two apps share the same original images - they both claim that space. What you will get back is the overhead of Aperture, that is the parts that were just Aperture specific.

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Answer 2

mbonnet Author

Level 1

6 points

Nov 2, 2020 4:07 PM in response to Yer_Man

Thank you for your response, Terence. I see that the sharing of content you describe appears to be accomplished with hard links:

$ stat -f "%Dl" DSC_7055.NEF 
2
$ cmp Pictures/Aperture\ Library.migratedaplibrary/.../DSC_7055.NEF \
Pictures/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary/.../587DC3B1-1FC3-4859-A6C8-94757774D477.nef
$

So yes, I should be able to remove the Aperture library without ill effect, and yes, I won't get all that space back. Some is better than none, I suppose. I'm glad that Apple thought that through enough to use hard links.

Thanks again for your help.

R.I.P. Aperture. :(

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Answer 3

mbonnet Author

Level 1

6 points

Nov 2, 2020 4:36 PM in response to mbonnet

I just realized that I forgot to demonstrate how I found the Photos file that references the Aperture file in my previous post. For the benefit of the next person to ask this question:

# Get the inode of the file in the Aperture library for which we want to find the Photos twin:
$ cd "~/Pictures/Aperture Library.../Masters/path/to/file"
$ ls -i DSC_7055.NEF
1152230 DSC_7055.NEF

# Any other hard link to this file will also point to this inode.

# Get a list of all the inodes in the Photos library that could be a match,
# and search for the needle in that haystack.
$ cd "~/Pictures/Photos Library.../originals"
$ find . -type f -iname "*nef" | xargs ls -i > ~/photos-inodes
$ grep 1152230 ~/photos-inodes 
1152230 ./5/587DC3B1-1FC3-4859-A6C8-94757774D477.nef

The fact that both DSC_7055.NEF and 587DC3B1-1FC3-4859-A6C8-94757774D477.nef point to the same inode is proof that they are the same file. My call to `cmp` in my previous post is just me being obsessive. (And proving to myself that I'm reading inodes correctly... these are the pictures of my kids after all!)

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Can the Aperture librbary be deleted after migration to Photos?

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