Rob
I don't wanna sound snarky, but you should learn from your mistake, sort of. Don't necessarily focus on LR features vs Aperture features, but broaden your horizons a bit to devise a storage system that is independent of any application.
Not snarky at all, intact a very helpful post. I'd like to copy your as a whole and respond specifically to points made.
So take the image adjustments. You have to export those, and that means, unfortunately, a file. PSD, TIFF, JPEG are all pretty universal and application independent, so once it's done you're good. And you have the originals, hence at worst you reedit. ? What many folks are doing is exporting a smallish JPEG not as a final result, but as a visual template for what they want. An advantage of moving on is that you have a bunch of new RAW processors and image adjusters that might give you better results anyway.
>>> So, you're suggesting keeping the RAW images and exporting out a JPG visual reference file. This assumes you lose the adjustments ion the RAW n the export into another program. For sake of discussion, lets just call it LR. While a good idea, I'm not willing to go back and 'redo' thousands of shots. In my mind they are done. While better processors might come along, that's just the nature of tech. If my hand is forced, I feel I'm going to have to lock in my adjustments and find a reasonable file export. To Ernie's point, if I take all my RAW to .TIFF you're looking at 5x the space. Really not an option. Obviously keeping the RAW and exporting is the best solution on paper, but the work involved seems like moving backwards to me.
Now metadata. You can impart all the organization info you have in Aperture (or anything else, for that matter) just by using the very standard, very common, very useful IPTC and exif info, and maybe even Finder folders. A project/folder/album structure can be replicated in LR's collection set/collection (there are some differences in rules for these structures, but nothing much important), but you can also do the same with hierarchical keywords. And the latter could be used anywhere; even in Spotlight and the Finder. Again, insurance against getting into this box canyon in the future. Just write all that metadata to the images or XMP sidecars.
>>> Yes, this seems to be the only exit.
"Just write all that metadata to the images or XMP sidecars." I'm not sure what 'sidecars' are how you would literally 'write out' this meta. Can you explain ?
There are some things that are difficult to translate directly. This is because they are metadata peculiar to the application, not standard IPTC or exif metadata that can be written to files. Star ratings, color labels, rejects/picks. But, as Photos does, these can be made into keywords easily. Again, some differences in rules: ratings and labels usually only allow for one option, keywords many. My photo can be two star rated, and in LR or Aperture could only be two star, but I could keyword it with "one star, two stars, three stars" etc. This also is textual, meaning that "greater than" type searches would be very different with a two star keyword vs a two star rating. But doable. That might inform your workflow going forward, or you could simply convert all those "two stars" keywords to two stars by a simple filter and click, and then delete the keywords.
>>> Yes, color tags and star ratings are core to my org. I am hoping that this is so basic, that LR will simply implement. I understand the general idea though. Take the current meta like stars, colors - filter them into a smart folder and then hit them with keywords for that attribute. This can then be assembled on the other side with keywords, and possibly brought into another more visual system ( like colors )
Picks are sort of odd in Aperture; they aren't as visible as in LR, and they are only pick and no-pick, and have implications for stacks. But Aperture also has flag/no flag, separate from pick. LR just does pick/reject/none. And that's across everything without special cases in collections and stacks. It's translatable via keywords, but takes some getting used to.
Understood.
TL;DR: you will have to export to preserve adjustments. You can save ALL the metadata via the use of keywords and other IPTC data written to the image files or sidecars, and in the long run, this is the best way to insure you don't get into this jam in the future, so consider changing your workflow to make it your normal practice. Focus on the universal IPTC and exif data fields for storing info, not what LR or C1 or Aperture or whatever stores in a proprietary database.
So, the obvious question is how does one get the meta to flow to IPTC from the beginning. ?? When I look at IPTC it really doesn't give me much. In Aperture, the important meta ( keywords, cam info, ratings, etc ) are all split up on different lists. How do you deal with this ?
Example of my 'flow' >> Arghhh.
