File Organization after import into Lightroom 6 from Aperture

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Level 1

8 points

File Organization after import into Lightroom 6 from Aperture

Hello,

Prior to transferring all my rather large Aperture 3 libraries into Lightroom 6 I am making test imports using the built-in import app. There are a coupe of issues I am having problems with. The first concerns naming. Projects transferred from Aperture are all called 'Project Photos' and are placed in containers (Collection Sets?) that have the original names from Aperture. See the screenshot below. Is it not possible to have the Aperture projects correctly named collections directly und the appropriate collection set. In the example shown in the screen shot this would be under 'Eiffel Flight'.

The other main issue is with the file structure of the original files. These are stored under LightroomMasters in the heirarchy Year | Month | Day. I have attached screenshots demonstrating this from inside LR and from the Finder. To avoid generating an extremely long list of folders I would like to be able to leave out the 'Day' level and have all images from one month in a single folder. Is this possible?

Both of these 'problems' can be dealt with manually, but with thousands of folders this is just impractical.

Am I making errors during import or are there ways to solve these issues?

Nick.

Aperture 3, iOS 9.3.1

Posted on Apr 17, 2016 8:02 AM

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Answer 1

Apr 17, 2016 9:15 AM in response to NicKenn

I don't necessarily know an easy way. This would totally come down to the importer itself and what it does.

It's important to realize that the way that Aperture and Lightroom organize things is quite different:

In Aperture, organization is purely virtual. The location on disk is pretty much hidden from you. And you can nest projects inside of folders, or albums inside of projects, and all sorts of things. It's flexible and it's nice.

In Lightroom, there are two areas for organization:

There are folders, which are the ACTUAL locations of the files on disk. If you change the name or organization here, it will change it on disk. Some people like the ability to see exactly where their files are on disk.

There are collections, which are PURELY virtual. They're more like Aperture albums (or smart albums), and they have their own hierarchy.

Probably you want to focus on the collections and not on the albums, as the latter are again just an exact copy of the folder structure you have on disk. To fix your album nesting, you'll need to manually drag the folders from the locations they're in into the month folders, from WITHIN Lightroom.

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Answer 2

NicKenn Author

Level 1

8 points

Apr 17, 2016 10:37 AM in response to William Lloyd

Thank you, William, for your reply.

I understand your advice to mean that I can completely ignore the Lightroom 'Folders' and their underlying counterpart, the original image files on disk. (I will continue to keep them all in the default folder, Lightroom Masters.) That's a relief. Maybe I can even make the Folders tab disappear.

You don't address my first query concerning the renaming of Aperture projects. The import add-in renames all Aperture projects as 'Project Photos' and puts them into Collection Sets, which are then correctly named. The Projects are thus in essence buried one layer too deep.This may be feature of the 'Import from Aperture' Add-In. I will test this by importing some files directly. That will perhaps bring clarity but no solution.

I am loathe to abandon Aperture but unfortunately Apple has abandoned us Aperture afficionados.

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Answer 3

Apr 18, 2016 7:03 AM in response to NicKenn

You may want to look at Aperture Exporter https://apertureexporter.com.

It preserves your original file structure. It worked well for me when I moved to Lightroom.

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Answer 4

NicKenn Author

Level 1

8 points

Apr 19, 2016 8:05 AM in response to Maddogjohn

Yes, thanks for the link. I've looked at Aperture Explorer and think that while it is quite flexible the add-in that is now supplied by Adobe in Lightroom probably does much the same job, albeit without the flexibility.

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Answer 5

Apr 22, 2016 12:50 PM in response to NicKenn

Aperture Exporter would do a better job of EXPORTING to achieve what you want, but you're past that now.

Aperture Projects (and albums and Aperture (not Finder) folders) behave differently than collection sets and collections in Lr. Both have different rules, so one cannot be mapped exactly to the other.

For example, a collection SET can ONLY contain collections. NOT individual photos. But a Project can contain BOTH albums AND individual photos. So when Lr encounters img1234.cr2 in Project Hawaii, it has to put it somewhere, since img1234.cr2 CANNOT be in collection set Hawaii. So it would probably be moved one level down to collection Hawaii.

That might explain the structure of the 24 Doomed Villages collection set for example.

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Answer 6

NicKenn Author

Level 1

8 points

Apr 24, 2016 5:35 AM in response to Rob Gendreau

Thanks for your input here Rob.

After carrying out many test transfers from Aperture 3 to Lightroom 6 I would amend your statement that LR Collection Sets can only contain Collections. It is correct that they cannot contain individual photos, but they can contain further nested Collection Sets. Hence it is possible to create a structure in LR that corresponds one to one with my Aperture organisation. The LR Import from Aperture plug-in cannot do this. It is easier and better to do the whole thing manually. For what its worth, here is my procedure.

I work on a 2009 iMac with the HD replaced by an SSD. In Aperture I have about 77,000 images in 7 managed libraries, all backed up in Aperture Vaults. ( In the meantime I regard it as mistaken to have used managed rather than referenced libraries and not to have backed up additionally using the Time-Machine. But that's another story.) Inside each library my images are sorted by year and then by project. Project names follow the rule YYYY-MM-DD | Subject. Here is an example.

I want to create a single Lightroom Catalog in which my Aperture libraries are Collection Sets with the same structure as in the original libraries.
Before exporting the original files I assign appropriate keywords to images that are flagged or have colour labels. I also assign to all the images in a library a keyword corresponding to the name of that library. This is a precaution against them getting mixed up in the new, single LR structure.
The original files are then exported. The crucial point here is to use the ability of Aperture to export files into a nested structure in which the folder hierarchy is generated by typing a forward slash between the folder levels. Here is an example from the Aperture export window:

This format generates a folder called AP-LIBRARY-A. Subfolders of AP-LIBRARY-A are generated corresponding to capture years, and these YEAR subfolders contain further subfolders corresponding to projects. This is what the result looks like in the Finder.

After importing into LR the folders are displayed exactly as I want them:

Using the LR plug-in to import from aperture has this result. Each individual project is put in a folder without any hierarchy. And collections are generated in which individual images are not in their folders directly, but in subfolders that are all names 'Project Photos'. This was the reason for my original post!

So all in all this process is not simple and neither Apple nor Adobe nor, as far as I can see, any independent programmer has come up with a satisfactory solution. I have now spent hours, days and weeks exploring this issue and making mistakes. And I haven't actually started working on the big libraries yet. That will certainly take more weeks and overnight runs.

I am grateful for your comments so far and will be for any further corrections or suggestion as to how to this better.

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