iPhoto to Aperture 3 import is a disaster.

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Level 1

13 points

iPhoto to Aperture 3 import is a disaster.

I bit the bullet and imported my iphoto library to aperture. Hundreds of 'duplicates'!!! Why do they not warn you of this? I have read a dozen books not to mention blogs about importing and no one has mentioned this at all! The file management system of iPhoto is so messed up, everytime you rotate a picture, it makes a new image, with every little edit, a new file. And ALL these are imported into Aperture. I could not understand where all these stacks were coming from! It's basically a big disaster. I'm thinking that my only solution is to use Time Machine to go back to before I imported this. Just make it 'go away' to speak. But I did save the masters as referenced on a separated drive (that is not backed up via Time Machine), so can I just delete those iphoto imports on that drive afterwards? Wow. BIG MISTAKE. I'm wondering if I should have just gone the Lightroom route, as the reason I decided to go with Aperture was that it was "so easy to transition from iPhoto!"

Posted on Aug 30, 2011 12:12 PM

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Answer 1

Aug 30, 2011 12:21 PM in response to MVA

According to http://www.apertureexpert.com/forum-user/post/1262813#post1265945, Aperture imports all iPhoto photos, and because iPhoto stores a new version for each edit, you're going to get all of them. However, it appears that the original camera versions are stamped with the keyword "iPhoto Original", while the edits are not, so it should be possible to quickly delete one set or the other. Play around a bit before you give up and migrate to other software packages.

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Answer 2

MVA Author

Level 1

13 points

Aug 30, 2011 1:41 PM in response to DallasTim

Thank you. I did read that post. (I wish I had known about it before!) I feel it sort of defeats the purpose of Aperture to have to choose either the original iPhoto image or the edit and delete all others in order to not have hundreds of duplicates. I chose to restore my old aperture library from before the import, putting it back to the way it was before. I will leave my iPhoto library as is for now. I may import or just add from the browser certain albums that I want to sync to my phone or ipad. Maybe I will eventually export albums from iPhoto and then import into Aperture. But importing the entire iPhoto library requires way too much effort to make sense of it. I will continue to play around with it. But I am finding that the main reasons I chose Aperture over the competition are not as they seemed to be. Not to say, that trying to find a way to transfer my iphoto library to Lightroom would be easy either. iPhoto kind of stinks (imho).

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Answer 3

Neil G

Level 3

770 points

Aug 30, 2011 8:45 PM in response to MVA

Migrating a "photo" from iPhoto to Aperture creates one or two Master images for each orginal "photo". Some cameras tag a 'portrait' image to indicate it needs to be rotated. Often this means that iPhoto gets a JPEG and the rotate-me tag results in a second JPEG image file. As the article linked above says, iPhoto preserves your original image files and ONE other file that has all the modifications. Technically, the rotated image may qualify as a modified file.

The opening of this thread says, "with every little edit, a new file". There is only ONE file in iPhoto that has all of an image's tweaks. That's why it's called 'destructive'. You can't back out changes, you can only start over with the Original. (Or you can Duplicate it, but then it's treated as a new/separate image.)

Yes, you can take some steps and eliminate all the 'duplicates' you found, but they really just take up the same amount of space your iPhoto Library took up anyway.

The assumption on the Aperture side is that you may be happy today with the tweaked iPhoto images but you can also go back to an iPhoto Original file and process it in Aperture. Stacks are a feature of Aperture that can keep Masters and favorite Versions together. Read up on them and you mey begin to understand their value.

...Neil

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