Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Other Raw Converters => Apple Aperture Q&A => Topic started by: KirbyKrieger on March 11, 2010, 12:54:04 pm
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Hi. After trying both Lr3b and Ap3Trial I purchased Ap3. I used Lr3b for three busy months. Has anyone moved a library or files from Lr3b to Ap3? I searched the Web, but turned up almost nothing. I'd like to preserve Masters and fully-developed Versions, Keywords & other metadata, and if possible Collections (which will become projects). Fairly straightforward, but I'm worried about bumps and potholes. Thanks.
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Hi Kirby - there may be a more efficient way, but let me tell you what I'm doing as a LR / LR2 user who moved to Aperture 3:
You can create as many libraries as you want and then switch between them. As you likely also know, you can import files into the "library" but store them in place, i.e., where they are now.
So under portraits, I'm going and exporting the developed versions as JPEGs and putting those in a folder along the lines of LR Developed. That folder will sit with another with the masters that I've just imported in place under a single project.
What I'm finding is that I like Aperture 3 so much more, that I keep the developed JPEGs from LR for expediency but I'm reworking several in Aperture from the RAW file.
Much (all?) of the metadata comes over with the JPEGs I've noticed, but I haven't looked at the LR raw files.
Keeping those JPEGs with the RAWs isn't stellar because of course, they aren't linked so that's another reason why I'm reworking RAWs in some cases. And when I say reworking, one of the things that I like about Aperture 3 is that I like the way files look SOOOO (a little emphasis) from the start that I'm adjusting them much less than I did in LR2.
Check out www.maccreate.com to see if there are discussions on this - there's an Aperture forum and some training (e-book - there's a large one there for $9.99, I believe it was) and video resources too (the Sara France one is fine after the first 15 minutes which are useless... perhaps I should care what inspired her to become a photographer, but I don't, not even a little bit and so more than 30 seconds on that is a bit much, but once she gets into the heart of things she does a fine job).
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I'll shorten Theodore's reply -- "You can't."
If you save your LR data to XMP files, the keywords and some of the metadata will come over but that's all. No ratings, no collections and no flags. And personally, the way Aperture handles keywords is one of the reasons I'm sticking with LR.
You'll have to import your raw files and make new Collections and Develop settings.
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I'll shorten Theodore's reply -- "You can't."
If you save your LR data to XMP files, the keywords and some of the metadata will come over but that's all. No ratings, no collections and no flags. And personally, the way Aperture handles keywords is one of the reasons I'm sticking with LR.
You'll have to import your raw files and make new Collections and Develop settings.
Keywords:
What about the handling of keywords did you find lacking? At first blush, I thought iPhoto did a better job w. keywords than either Lr3b or Ap3. There is some good keyword info in this Apple Discussion (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2362281&tstart=0).
Lr3b to Ap3:
After a few hours (and taking into consideration Theodore's work) I have come up with the following general outline.
[blockquote]- Backup entire Catalog and all files
- Convert all ratings to keywords
- Convert all colored flags to keywords (I don't use these, and won't do this).
- Convert all picks to keywords (Lr3b's picks are collection-sensitive: a photo which is a pick in one Collection is not automatically a pick in any other collections). This can't be done universally -- I almost certainly won't spend the time to do it, as I haven't used picks consistently and don't mind losing them.
- Keyword all photos in each Collection with the Collection name. Also can't be done universally, but probably can be slightly automated. I will do this -- I want to recreate all my Collections in Ap3
- Export new versions of all developed photos (one could do a subset of these, e.g.: "4-star and above"). Fortunately, keywords are not considered changes -- I can easily filter for photos which have been edited, and export those. I can't get Ap3 to recognize DNG files exported from Lr3b. These developed photos are not that important to me -- I'll save them as JPEG if I can get good enough quality, or TIFF.
- Import all raw files (sidecar files are automatically included). Haven't decided whether to reference these or have them managed.
- Reverse the keywording done above: convert back to ratings, colored flags, (picks, if done).
- Import all exported developed photos. Am still working out how to stack these with the original raws. I want to end up with pairs of 'raw & Lr3b-developed-and-exported' files.
- Create Projects by filtering on the Collections-keywords
- Test. Retest. Delete Lr3b installation.
[/blockquote]
Time consuming, but not complex. I don't own Lightroom. For me the alternatives are
. buy Lightroom 3 when it comes out, or
. import all the raw files into Ap3 and abandon all the Lr3b developed versions
Comments?
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That's a creative way to move ratings from LR. And it sounds easy.
The things I like about keywording in LR better than Ap are the Keyword List, the fact that I can have nested keywords where some don't export and the fact that the Keyword List shows a count of how many images have a particular keyword. I dislike the fact that keywords are show in paragraph form in Ap.
For me, keywording seems better thought out in LR. But that's just for me. I'm sure other people prefer AP keywording.
My wife bought me a copy of Ap 1 for my birthday years ago. I tried to use it but LR really was better back then. I downloaded the trial of Ap2 and tried again. I downloaded the trial of Ap3 but I'm still happy with LR although there are some things in Ap that are great.