How to go from Managed to Referenced and retain Aperture Folder Structure?

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Level 1

21 points

How to go from Managed to Referenced and retain Aperture Folder Structure?

I'm preparing to become "Aperture Independent". My first step is to go from Managed to Referenced. With the photos outside Aperture, I can switch to another DAM or just use the Finder with another editor like Affinity. I've spent so much time organizing the folder structure in Aperture, I want to retain this exact folder structure in the Finder. I've experimented changing to Referenced photos, but it seems Aperture puts all photos in one giant Folder. Maybe I'm missing something here? Is there a 3rd party software that exports from Aperture and retains the folder structure? Has anyone found a workflow that works well for this?

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X El Capitan (10.11.1)

Posted on Jan 30, 2016 9:45 AM

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Answer 1

léonie

Level 10

200,669 points

Jan 30, 2016 10:10 AM in response to gno2

I've spent so much time organizing the folder structure in Aperture,

What kind of folders?

Folders for projects or for albums?

Aperture's presets allow you to create subfolders for your projects, when you relocate the originals, but to preserve your folders for projects you would have to relocate the projects for each folder individually.

For more control over the subfolders use the Edit panel in the "File > Relocate" dialog. Set the subfolder format to "Edit" instead of one of the presets.

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Answer 2

Lanny

Level 6

13,225 points

Jan 30, 2016 10:18 AM in response to gno2

There are various choices available with Aperture's export command that would allow you to create subfolders for your projects. You could then fine tune the organization with the Finder.

I don't know of any 3rd party software that would do this, probably wouldn't be profitable to develop such a limited purpose software.

The whole reasoning for offering the initial choice of managed versus reference should be made after consideration of the pros and cons of each method. Most of photo mangement softwares that I'm aware of, i.e., Aperture, Lightroom and Pro 1, have default management schemes that use folders organized by dates.

When I switched to Lightroom, I switched to a referenced system using folders named after events/projects. It's what ever works for you.

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Answer 3

gno2 Author

Level 1

21 points

Jan 30, 2016 10:26 AM in response to léonie

Thanks for the quick response Leonie - I'm mainly interested in folders for Projects for my wife's and my libraries. There are literally thousands of Projects, and each project is in a folder that is within another folder, and so-on. If I had to create each folder by hand and export each project individually it would take hours / days and I'd surely screw something up. I simply don't have the time. If it comes down to that I'd have one of my programmers write a script - but I would rather not have him do that either.

BTW - have you decided on what to do after Aperture yet? I can't find a suitable replacement yet and will just hang on to Aperture for now. Photos is far too limiting at this point for me.

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Answer 4

gno2 Author

Level 1

21 points

Jan 30, 2016 10:46 AM in response to Lanny

Thanks Lanny - My Wife's and My folder structures are very similar to Lightroom's default. Year, then either Month, or groups of months. And then we've created projects for each day. But sometimes I'll have multiple projects within a single day for special photo groupings. Or might might have a single folder under the year for a vacation like Disney 2015 with projects by day within that folder. And then we have other photos that have been emailed to us, and scanned photos. The Dates on emailed photos or scans are not always correct. So while the Aperture to Lightroom utility is really cool, it strips out any of our special folders that we've created.

I switched to Aperture only in the last year or two even though it was discontinued. I love it. Our folders structures prior to Aperture were NOT GOOD and they were on Windows. It is difficult and dangerous to organize using Windows Explorer as you can accidentally drag folder to destinations you didn't intend. Finder is also dangerous. I find Aperture a phenomenal organizational tool - it is so fast and visual. So we've been using Aperture to organize. I just assumed (incorrectly) that Aperture would create Finder Folders that mimic it's own folders when exporting.

There is a 3rd party software called ProofBURNER for Aperture that can burn your photos to a DVD and supposedly retain Aperture's folder structure. They said you can also use this software to export to a normal folder instead of a DVD. Looks good, but I'm alway skeptical about 3rd party software and am always looking for recommendations.

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Answer 5

Lanny

Level 6

13,225 points

Jan 30, 2016 10:52 AM in response to gno2

I'm now using a referenced file structure, as previously given, in Lightroom. Once done, it looks like this in Lightroom:

Once done however, you need to use Lightroom to organize the file structure, in lieu of the Finder, to keep Lightroom in the loop.

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Answer 6

gno2 Author

Level 1

21 points

Jan 30, 2016 11:08 AM in response to Lanny

Lanny - if you use lightroom to create folders - does it create the appropriate folders in the Finder too?

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Answer 7

Lanny

Level 6

13,225 points

Jan 30, 2016 11:10 AM in response to gno2

Yes, exactly.

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Answer 8

léonie

Level 10

200,669 points

Jan 30, 2016 11:33 AM in response to gno2

BTW - have you decided on what to do after Aperture yet? I can't find a suitable replacement yet and will just hang on to Aperture for now. Photos is far too limiting at this point for me.

I keep my archive in Aperture for the time being and a smaller library with the photos I am currently working on in Photos. I am lucky, because the basic structure of the Photos Library with Moments - Collections - Years is exactly the structure I used too for my Aperture projects anyway. Now I am getting it for free. In addition to that I used keywords and smart albums, and the keywords migrated nearly lossleesly from Aperture.

The main reason I am trying out Photos is, that I like iCloud Photo Library to keep the photo library in sync across all my Macs. I can start editing on the iMac and continue on one of my my MacBook Pros.

I started to migrate from Aperture to digiKam, because it is very versatile and supports all I would ever need in a photo application. And it would make it easy to switch from a Mac to back to Linux, but I cannot recommend it at the moment. With each system upgrade I would have to wait for an compatibility update and start over again with reinstalling the MacPorts and X. It would become tedious in the long run. It worked very well in Yosemite, but I could not find an El Capitan compatible version yet. Not being able to upgrade the system because the photo application is not supported on the new system would be too restrictive.

If Apple keeps improving Photos and more powerful photo editing extensions become available, I will stick with Photos.

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Answer 9

gno2 Author

Level 1

21 points

Jan 30, 2016 12:00 PM in response to léonie

Thanks Leonie. That's a great strategy. I don't know anything about digiKam.

I have a lot of hope for Photos. Aperture has an issue in that it is single user / single computer due to SQL Lite. I think Apple knew that the future is cloud storage with the ability to edit on any of your devices. Re-writing Aperture for that was too costly so they started building Photos from scratch. That's my theory anyway. But the 1st iteration of Photos had to be minimal as this is an enormous project. I'm hoping Photos improves greatly in the future.

I was thinking about using Photos the same way as you - only storing a small subset in Photos for sharing with the family. Putting all our photos in the cloud would require me to pay for 1TB iCloud storage. Then I get nervous. And I don't know how good Photos is at searching for a needle in a haystack. And as our iPhones and Cameras have greater and greater resolution the file sizes keep getting bigger. 4k video files are 7 times the size of 1080p. So maybe Apple Photos would only be for a small subset of photos.

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Answer 10

May 23, 2016 11:24 AM in response to gno2

Making the switch to Lightroom myself. Looking to change from Managed > Referenced before using the Adobe 'import from Aperture' plugin. Two questions. What is the best way to set up the subfolders for this so that I can retain something close to this structure in LR? My aperture library consists of yearly folders that are filled with various projects. Some projects are date specific, others only specific to the month.

2015 (folder)

- Plaza de Armas - 2015-01-16 (project)

- Street | 2015 - January (project)

Second question, can I do this bit by bit, say year folder by year folder? I figure this way I can do the import from LR at the end of the day and it'll be ready the next morning instead of doing it all at once and tying up the processor. If so, how do I do this? Something intuitive that I'll discover?

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Answer 11

léonie

Level 10

200,669 points

May 23, 2016 9:41 PM in response to ironchefchris

You can relocate originals folder by folder. Select all images in a folder in Aperture for relocation as referenced images, then use "File > Relocate".

When the dialog opens, select suitable presets for the folder and the filename. If you select "Edit" for the naming presets, you can customize the folder names and filenames.

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Answer 12

Dec 5, 2016 4:19 AM in response to gno2

Not sure if this is still relevant, but there is a wonderful $19.95 in the osX app-store that will do exactly that.

It is called "Exporter for Aperture"

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