Q: importing large aperture files into photo

Photos cannot import an Aperture library, but open an Aperture Library and create a migrated copy.

If you open a referenced Aperture library in Photos it will migrate the referenced files as referenced and the file/folder structure of the referenced files will remain.

Photos does not have a projects structure like Aperture.  All your projects and albums will be mapped to albums. For each project an album will be created.

See this support document:   How Photos handles content and metadata from iPhoto and Aperture - Apple Support

I have never used Aperture Exporter, so I cannot comment on that part of your question.

I posted a user tip with some notes on migrating, see:  Notes on Migrating an Aperture Library from Aperture to Photos for Mac

The biggest problem when migrating will be the metadata you assigned to your photos.  Photos simply has a very limited support for displaying metadata. It will depend on which metadata tags you used in Aperture, if you need to copy these data to metadata fields you can access in Photos.

• Titles and captions: Photos will show the titles and captions you assigned in Aperture, but not the version names, that are filenames. if you want to see filenames as titles, batch change your images and copy the filenames to the title fields.
• Keywords:  If you used hierarchical keywords, rename them, so the hierarchy will be preserved. Keywords will be migrated flat, for example, if you have a hierarchy animal > bird > sparrow, a photo tagged with "sparrow" will have three keywords in Photos: animal, bird, and sparrow.  You might consider to rename your sparrow keyword to animal-bird-sparrow to save the relation.
• Custom metadata tags: Any custom metadata tags will be lost. You could copy them to supported fields, for example the caption field.
• Many IPTC tags will still be associated with the original files, but you will not be able to browse them in Photos, for example the copyright tagAll tags you want to preserve should either be copied to the caption filed or turned into keywords.

I recommend, that you explore Photos before you migrate your large Aperture library. Export a small test library from your Aperture library and migrate it to Photos. Check for yourself, how the features that are essential to you, have been migrated. The biggest difference you'll notice will be that there are no projects. Photos creates "Moments" instead, based on the location and the capture date. Photos taken at the same place at the same time will be automatically grouped as a moment. It is essential, that all photos have location data, or your moments will not be very descriptive. You cannot name them yourself.

2) How long is it likely to take given the size of my library - 250,000 frames, 1T ? (Three days, a week, longer ?)

The largest Aperture library I migrated has 40000 images and it took about three hours to migrate.

An example of what I have in Aperture is a Project with, say North America and then three folders for USA, Canada and Mexico, and each one has folders for states or regions, then folders for Cities, then monuments etc...

Thoughts anyone ?

Create a folder for each of your projects, name it like the project and move the project with its child albums and folders  into this folder. Photos will migrate the subordinate albums as albums in this folder. and maintain the folder hierarchy.

The problem with your library are the gigantic projects with many photos - probably because of the unfortunate name of "project" for these library items.  None of my Aperture projects has more than a few hundred photos. The projects are my film rolls with the shoots from one day. And they are the leaves in the hierarchy of folders, not the root - I have folders for decades "2010-2020", then subfolders for each year, for each travel destination, plenty of smart albums, and at the bottom are the projects. This structure migrated seamlessly to Photos.

By the way, I have stopped using Aperture for RAW conversion (I use Capture One) and for important editing I use Affinity; I then send the JPGs or TIFF into Aperture...

Affinity Beta already provides an Photo Editing Extension "Affinity Retouching".  It is available in Photos, if you install Affinity Photo Beta in addition to Affinity Photo. It makes Photos quite versatile.

Thanks, Marc. It is good to know, that the current version should come with the Photo Editing extensions.

I have Affiniy 1.3.5 installed, on four different Macs.  But the update from the previous version did not install the Editing extensions, on none of my Macs. I had to install the Beta as well, and only then did Affinity Retouching show in Photos.

Perhaps this is different, if we install Affinity from scratch and not as an update.

Am I correct in my understanding that iCloud Photo Library and the Photos app do not provide any control over which images are stored in the cloud? I realize you can choose which devices download the full resolution files, so this is a separate question.

freediverx01 wrote:

 

Am I correct in my understanding that iCloud Photo Library and the Photos app do not provide any control over which images are stored in the cloud? I realize you can choose which devices download the full resolution files, so this is a separate question.

It is really simple - you cannot upload selected items only. The whoe library will sync with iCloud, with a few exeptions:

• All image files and videos in your Photos library that are compatible with iCloud Photo Library and have been imported as managed into the Photos Library will upload to iCloud Photos Library.
• Incompatible items will not upload and may even cause the upload to hang eternally.
• Referenced files are not eligible for iCloud. Only items imported as managed will upload to iCloud Photo Library.