silence2-38554
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Q: Moving from Aperture to Photos & library consolidation = completely disorganized disaster.....

Okay, so over the past few weeks I've been working on simplifying & consolidating my digital photo life.  I started by migrating my primary Aperture library over to Photos.  I had about 5 separate, older libraries on various external drives that I dragged & dropped the "Masters" folder from, into the new library.

 

Well, all this resulted in is all of the organization that I had in my original Aperture library being totally useless, as everything in the "iPhoto Events" folder that it created in Photos is empty.  The albums are there but they are gray & nothing is in any of them.  In addition to that, Photos seems to be completely incapable of recognizing duplicates, because even though it would detect the first one & I would select "don't import" and "apply to all duplicates", it would proceed to import the rest as duplicates.

 

And lastly, somehow, the dates on several thousand pictures seem to be incorrect now, when they weren't before.  If I go to "get info" on pictures that were clearly taken consecutively, the metadata shows them as being taken a couple days apart.

 

I tried rebuilding the library, nothing changed.

 

So then, I'm left with empty albums, about 7k duplicated photos and no chronological organization whatsoever.  Awesome.  If anyone has any suggestions at all, I'm all ears.

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Yosemite (10.10.5), 27" Thunderbolt Display

Posted on Oct 6, 2015 11:20 AM

by léonie,Apple recommended
léonie léonie
Level 10 (108,693 points)
iCloud
A:

Is there a reason why you did not use Aperture to merge all your libraries into one library before migrating to Photos?

Aperture can detect duplicates when merging libraries  (Aperture 3.3: How to use Aperture to merge iPhoto libraries)  and your projects, edits, and metadata would have been preserved. See:  How Photos handles content and metadata from iPhoto and Aperture - Apple Support

By importing only the Masters folder to Photos you sacrificed all your library organization.

 

Would it be possible for you to start over and merge the libraries in aperture, and then to open the merged library in Photos?

Posted on Oct 6, 2015 11:30 AM

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silence2-38554

Q: Moving from Aperture to Photos & library consolidation = completely disorganized disaster.....

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  • Helpful answers

  • by léonie,Apple recommended

    léonie léonie Oct 6, 2015 11:30 AM in response to silence2-38554
    Level 10 (108,693 points)
    iCloud
    Oct 6, 2015 11:30 AM in response to silence2-38554

    Is there a reason why you did not use Aperture to merge all your libraries into one library before migrating to Photos?

    Aperture can detect duplicates when merging libraries  (Aperture 3.3: How to use Aperture to merge iPhoto libraries)  and your projects, edits, and metadata would have been preserved. See:  How Photos handles content and metadata from iPhoto and Aperture - Apple Support

    By importing only the Masters folder to Photos you sacrificed all your library organization.

     

    Would it be possible for you to start over and merge the libraries in aperture, and then to open the merged library in Photos?

  • by Terence Devlin,

    Terence Devlin Terence Devlin Oct 6, 2015 11:31 AM in response to silence2-38554
    Level 10 (139,587 points)
    iLife
    Oct 6, 2015 11:31 AM in response to silence2-38554

      I had about 5 separate, older libraries on various external drives that I dragged & dropped the "Masters" folder from, into the new library.

     

    Not sure what you hoped would happen, but if you drag bits of a library out and just drop them into a new application it's hardly going to migrate all the library, just the bits.

     

    So, frankly, you did it wrong.

     

    Now what is your desired end product? If you want to have these five libraries merged into one do that in Aperture first.

     

    Then having merged them, migrate them to Photos. You do this simply by opening the Aperture Library with Photos:

     

    Hold down the option (or alt) key key and launch Photos. From the resulting menu select 'Choose Library'

     

    That's it.

  • by silence2-38554,

    silence2-38554 silence2-38554 Oct 9, 2015 11:15 AM in response to léonie
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Oct 9, 2015 11:15 AM in response to léonie

    Okay, I scrapped the scrambled library and started over.  This time, I started with my most current Aperture library & imported the other various libraries into that one.  Unfortunately, this did not help in avoiding duplicates & I would up with hundreds upon hundreds of duplicates.  I then used Brattoo's Aperture Duplicate Annihilator to sort through & mark the duplicates as such, then deleting all photos marked as "Duplicate".

     

    Now, however, I'm noticing that certain small chunks of photos are just missing as I scroll through my timeline.  AGH!  How are people supposed to merge libraries, avoid or delete duplicates, all while ensuring you're not deleting any photos in the process?? 

  • by Terence Devlin,

    Terence Devlin Terence Devlin Oct 9, 2015 11:45 AM in response to silence2-38554
    Level 10 (139,587 points)
    iLife
    Oct 9, 2015 11:45 AM in response to silence2-38554

    What are 'small chunks of photos'?

  • by silence2-38554,

    silence2-38554 silence2-38554 Oct 9, 2015 5:50 PM in response to Terence Devlin
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Oct 9, 2015 5:50 PM in response to Terence Devlin

    I'll be scrolling through photos from an event from say, 5 years ago and only half the photos are there, the rest are nowhere to be found.  My point being that Brattoo's Duplicate Annihilator seems to be mis-identifying photos as duplicates when they are not.  Does anyone know of a better method for avoiding / deleting duplicates?  When there are like..... 7,000 potential duplicates?

  • by léonie,

    léonie léonie Oct 9, 2015 11:21 PM in response to silence2-38554
    Level 10 (108,693 points)
    iCloud
    Oct 9, 2015 11:21 PM in response to silence2-38554

    You could try Photo Sweeper. It lets you define the rules of what is to be considered a duplicate - if you are looking for identical files or similar photos, photos at different pixel size or similar.

    It will collect all candidates for deletion in a album "Photo sweeper trash" and you can delete from there  after checking the photos that have been selected. I always delete in small groups, after using "Show in Moment" for  photos that are important for me. This way I can see if another copy will still be there.