How to get my photos from Aperture 3.6 to my brand-new iMac

The things you should do, while you still have your old computer, where Aperture is still running:

• Ensure, that you let Aperture create high resolution previews of all images with adjustments, as described in this discussion: Migrating aperture library to Photos - Apple Community. Other apps cannot recreate the Aperture adjustments, so the edited versions need to be exported at the best possible resolution. When we convert a n Aperture Library to a Photos Library, the previews will be used as the edited versions. If Aperture has been set to use small previews, sufficient for the resolution of the display, you will not have full resolution edited versions when you drag and drop Aperture photos to export them or when you migrate the library to Photos. It will also help when migrating to Lightroom: Get Big Previews in Aperture Before Moving to LightroomYouTubehttps://www.youtube.com · Photofocus
• To be able to access the photos and videos in your Aperture Libraries on your new computer, I would create Photos Libraries from the Aperture Libraries. This is best done on a Mac with macOS 10.14 Mojave or earlier, for example your current old Mac. Notes on Migrating an Aperture Library to Photos for Mac, 2019 version . Even if you are not planning to use Photos as a replacement for Aperture (as it is not a professional app), it will give you access to the media in your libraries and the structure of the libraries, the albums, folders, and projects and many of the metadata. The migration to Photos is no longer easy on macOS 10.15 Catalina or later, as Aperture cannot run on these system versions, and on macOS 13 Ventura it is no longer supported at all.
• And I would ensure, that all media files in your Aperture Libraries are converted to a format, that is compatible with your new Mac. If you have imported audio files for slideshows into your Aperture Libraries, remove them. They might cause Photos to hang. Test all file formats and codecs used in your old libraries, if they can be opened on your new Mac. Particularly old videos could be using codecs, that can no longer be played on your new Mac. Scanned images may be using color sync profiles, that are no longer installed on the new Mac. Converting them to a new format will be easier on our old mAc. Keep your new Mac until you are sure that you can open and edit all media formats in your Aperture Libraries. I migrated my Aperture Libraries to Photos long ago, in 2015, when Apple released the last upgrade. But occasionally I am still coming across videos, that cannot played or TIFFs with unsupported color sync profiles, not in my Photos Libraries, but embedded in old Power Point or Keynote presentations. Then I am glad I am still having a Mac with macOS 10.14 Mojave, where I can open my old Aperture Libraries and convert the videos or image files.

Timsta61 wrote:

Thanks

I will have to process this a bit but sounds like the solution I am looking for. I’ll have a bit of a play over the weekend.

Another thought I had - What if I were to save them all to a folder on the desk top?

When you save the photos to the Desktop you will have to export them from Aperture and will decide, if you want to save the originals, or the edited versions, or both. You really should export both the originals and the edited versions to save your work. But the exported image files will no longer be stacked as Master-Version pairs. and you will have to export the projects and albums to nested folders to save the structure of your library.

Yer_Man already told you that Lightroom Classic can open the Aperture Libraries directly and migrate them as a library.

I would transfer your Aperture Libraries to the new Mac by putting the libraries on an external drive, where the "Ignore Ownership on this Volume" flag is enabled. This will prevent problems with the file ownership, when you access the library on your new Mac.

Use an external drive that has been prepared as described here for Photos: Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support

Alternately, if your old Mac has been set up to allow remote ac cess to the drive, you can copy the libraries directly between your Mac over the local network: Allow a remote computer to access your Mac – Apple Support (UK)

Some possibilities:

You can copy the Aperture Library to the new machine and migrate it from there to Lightroom Classic. LRC has a feature to do this. There are other apps that can help also, among them Avalanche:

https://cyme.io/avalanche-photo-conversion/

There is no need to involve Photos in this process at all. Just copy your Aperture library from the old machine to the Pictures Folder on the new machine. That's it.