I have a 2012 iMac running Catalina 10.15.7. I missed the opportunity to migrate my Aperture library to Photos or Adobe Lightroom Classic before I upgraded to Catalina. Is there anyway I can now get those photos from the Aperture library to Photos or any app?
iMac 27″, macOS 10.15
The paid version of PowerPhotos can migrate, i.e. copy, an Aperture library into an existing Photos library. It will copy both edited and original image files, albums, smart albums (as regular albums), metadata (title, captions, favorites) and can detect and isolate duplicates during the migration so you can decide which to keep and delete.
The paid version of PowerPhotos can migrate, i.e. copy, an Aperture library into an existing Photos library. It will copy both edited and original image files, albums, smart albums (as regular albums), metadata (title, captions, favorites) and can detect and isolate duplicates during the migration so you can decide which to keep and delete.
Photos 5 on Catalina can still create a new Photos Library for your Aperture Libraries, but you missed the opportunity to run Aperture to prepare your library for the migration in aperture. You will get a migrated library with the albums and the projects as albums, with all original image fies, but the edited versions may be in a poor quality, if your library does not have high resolution previews for all photos. Then you will lose the work you have done in Aperture.
If your Aperture Library does not have high resolution previews for the edited versions and you have no Mac where you still can run Aperture, you could patch Aperture to be able to run a crippled version on Catalina (GitHub - cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive: Run Aperture, iPhoto, or iTunes on macOS Catalina.). It should suffice as an emergency measure to be able to render previews and save the edited versions, but do not rely on it as a full Aperture version. It can break any time.
If you have a spare external drive, you could format it as Mac OS X Extended (Journaled), install an older version of macOS that is suitable for doing the conversion, and copy your Aperture library to the drive. You want to work from a copy, not from the original, in case something goes wrong.
If you're paranoid enough, you may want to make/update a backup of your Aperture library on another external drive, and then disconnect that external drive for the duration of the conversion.
Theh you could boot from the new external startup drive and do the conversion. If that succeeds and you are happy with the results, reboot from your Catalina startup disk, and copy the Photos Library (or the Lightroom Classic catalog, etc. and the photos it references) over to where you're going to store them long-term.
Note that if you already have a Photos Library under Catalina, you might not want to overwrite it. You can keep the new Photos Library under another name (e.g., "Aperture Photos Library") and switch between your Photos Libraries by holding down the Option key when launching Photos.
How to download macOS - Apple Support
Aperture is no longer available in the Mac App Store – at least, not to anyone who never bought it before. Apple announced that Aperture would be discontinued in 2014, and pulled it from the Mac App Store in 2015.
Because Aperture is a 32-bit application, it will not run on macOS Catalina or later. There is a clever tool called Retroactive that can patch a copy of Aperture to run, after a fashion, on Catalina. But some features break, and depending on any unsupported patch like this for a production system is rather risky.
If you're running Catalina then you've missed no opportunities.
Even if you're running Ventura, you still haven't, though things may be more complicated.
So: Two questions:
What OS are you running on your Mac?
What app do you want to migrate to? You need to pick one, and I would point out that Photos is a lot less capable than Aperture.
I take it this thread describes the "missed the opportunity to migrate" issue that you mention:
Migrating from Aperture to Photos - do wi… - Apple Community
Good information, thank you! I have been having many issues with my old Mac (3.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX 2 GB). It was awesome for many years. It is very problematic now and I am planning on replacing it; but before I do that I am trying to ensure that I can save my old Aperture photos because I am afraid of loosing them when I get a new computer. I also have a similar issue with iMovie and the videos that are no longe accessible to me with Catalina. Unfortunately, as you can probably see for yourself... I really am not very computer literate.
There is no need to worry if you get anew machine. The thing is to be ready for it. What's not an option is staying with Aperture. It is dead and was killed off 8 years ago now. Your new machine machine that simply won't run it at all. So now is the time to decide what the future is: pick the app you're going to move to and get on with it. Then move to the new machine.
Yes, it does describe that. Thanks so much for your help! This stuff does not come easily to me lol.
I am running Catalina 10.15.7
I would much prefer Aperture but I thought it was no longer available?
Migrating Aperture library
