Advice On Merging Library's

Mount your new HD and your Aperture Library HD. Using Finder, copy your Aperture Library to your new HD.

Test it. Make sure everything works.

Disconnect your old Aperture HD. When you have another backup of your Aperture Library, delete the one on what is now your old Aperture HD.

Mount your iPhoto HD. Import your iPhoto Library using the built-in Aperture tools. (Lots of posts and info on this -- search should turn up hints.) Make sure to import your iPhoto Library in such a way that your Masters are copied into your Aperture Library on your new HD.

Confirm that it works. If you want to take an extra step, run "Repair Library" overnight.

At this point you should make a new back-up (copy) of your newly merged Library.

Stop using your old iPhoto Library.

Aperture excels at organization. You should thoroughly plan how you want to organize the merged Aperture Library prior to merging. I'm pretty sure your Aperture Images that were brought in from an iPhoto Library will be keyworded in such a way that you can identify and group them.

Three little things to add to Kirby Krieger's excellent advice:

Import your iPhoto Library using the built-in Aperture tools.

• There are two tools to import from iPhoto to Aperture:
  1. File -> Import -> iPhoto LIbrary
  2. Show iPhoto Browser
• Use the first option; this will recreate your iPhoto organisation (folders, events, albums) as far as possible and mirror your iPhoto library in Aperture. Also it will try to join original master images and edited versions in proper master-version pairs, so you will save plenty of space. With the iPhoto Browser you will only import previews of the edited versions, not the original masters and loose quality.
• Also make sure your new harddrive is formatted MacOS extended (and not case sensitive), before you store your Aperture library there. Aperture has more problems with wrong formatting than early versions of iPhoto.
• Inspect the trash in your iPhoto Library, if anything important is in it. The trash will not be imported into Aperture 😝 afaik.

Regards

Léonie

(I hope you understand what I am getting at here)

😝 😕 Not quite, but I am sure we will sort that out with Kirby's aid! Kirby is the resident expert on Library organization!

First the simple part of your question: It is relatively easy to figure out what is in the different libraries; browse them using Aperture, or look inside the package in the Finder.

• To browse using Aperture: Use the main Aperture menu bar: File -> Switch to Library
  to switch between your Aperture libraries and to inspect them.
• To browse using the Finder: Select the library in the Finder window and ctrl-click it. From the pop-up menu select "Show Package Contents". Open the "Masters" folder in the Finder and look at the Master images,

65 gifgs onboard

If you do not remember creating this library it may have been created accidentally, when you were using Aperture without your external volume being mounted. Usually Aperture then creates a library in a default location, your "Pictures" folder.

What I meant with "Space saving" is the following: I hope Kirby will elaborate on this

By now you probably are familiar with Aperture's non destructive workflow. Aperture keeps -and never changes - the original master image file. All edits are stored as versions in a way that it is possible to undo the edits step by step and to revert to the original master image file. The version image is not actually created, only the steps to create it are stored, This saves space and results in far better image processing results than storing the intermediate images.

When you import from iPhoto you will want to do it in a way that you have the original master plus the edited version in a way that Aperture can create a master-version pair as described above. Only importing as "File -> Import -iPhoto Library" will ensure this. All other import strategies will give you only the masters or the version, or both as unrelated new masters.

Before Kirby and I can proceed with your questions tell us what you know (or find out) about the different libraries you have, and exactly what imports you already have done from iPhoto. You already seem to have some images imported.