Moving adjustments from one library to another???

[dsado]

Hello LL community,

After using aperture for about a year I bought a new computer and decided to get serious about keeping my aperture library organized.  I felt that it was best for me to start from scratch so that I could ensure that my library was perfectly organized the way I needed it to be.  The orignal library had a lot of projects with a lot of photos with a lot of adjustments.  I would like to take these adjustments and apply them to the same images in my new organized library.  I started out by switching between my old library and new library and literally writing down every measurement for every option on every photo.  I have several thousand photos that have adjustments so you can understand why doing this for every photo is excruciatingly time consuming.     

As aperture doesn't allow for multiple libraries to be open at once, I was curious if anybody has every tried to do what I am doing and done this in a more efficient fashion.  I'd love to be able to export just adjustments to the photos in my old library and load them into my new one.  Or better yet, export the photo with adjustments in my old library and have those adjustments available when I import them into my new library.  Kind of like a photoshop .psd file.  Is there an aperture file??

I feel like there has to be some type of feature within the software and I'm just not seeing it?

Or am I stuck?

It's come time to HAVE to do this in order to free up some much needed space.  I've been dreading/ pushing off the inevitable for quite some time.  Any insight on this is greatly appreciated!! Thank you in advance!

-d

[KirbyKrieger]

Read the section of the User Manual on Libraries.

Use "File→Export→Project as new Library" and then merge the exported-from-your-old-Library Library into your new Library.

To save disk space, convert some (or all) Images Masters from Managed to Referenced.

Unless I'm missing something, it makes no sense at all to create a new Library from existing Master files and then attempt to recreate Versions by either creating them new, adjustment by adjustment, or by somehow exporting the adjustments and applying them anew to this second set of Masters (which cannot be done anyway).

As far as I can tell from what you've posted, you have no reason to create a new Library.  Create a new top-level Folder (called, perhaps, "My old Library") and move all of your existing containers into it.  Then piece by piece (depends very much on what your final organization is and how much it varies from what you have) move things into a new Library structure you build.  Eventually, your "My old Library" Folder will be empty, and you can delete it.

You should, of course, prepare and confirm a working back-up before proceeding. 

I posted a concise guide to Aperture 3 on Apple's Aperture discussion forum ("The Well-trod Path") which may help you.

[MartinProsperi]

This problem is very well solved in LR because of the XMP files.

Ø3

[KirbyKrieger]

Could you expand on that?  It wasn't at all clear to me what "the problem" was -- and as I don't use Lightroom, I don't know what you mean by "the use of XMP files".

I understand this sounds like partisan gauntlet-tossing (as does your post).  Please ignore that aspect.  I am genuinely interested in knowing more of the workflow you seem to be proposing.

[MartinProsperi]

Well... All the adjustments done in the RAW File are stored in 2 ways: 1. encrypted into the Lightroom Library like it does Aperture with its Library. 2. Written in an XMP file, which is just a file that can be opened with TextEdit. Each adjustment you apply to the RAW File is automatically written into the XMP file. There is an XMP file for each picture.

This is how it does look an XMP for inside:

<x:xmpmeta xmlns:x="adobe:ns:meta/" x:xmptk="Adobe XMP Core 4.2-c020 1.124078, Tue Sep 11 2007 23:21:40        ">
 <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
  <rdf:Description rdf:about=""
    xmlns:exif="http://ns.adobe.com/exif/1.0/">
   <exif:ExposureTime>1/50</exif:ExposureTime>
   <exif:ShutterSpeedValue>5643856/1000000</exif:ShutterSpeedValue>
   <exif:FNumber>56/10</exif:FNumber>
   <exif:ApertureValue>4970854/1000000</exif:ApertureValue>
   <exif:ExposureProgram>1</exif:ExposureProgram>
   <exif:DateTimeOriginal>2006-04-27T06:58:40-03:00</exif:DateTimeOriginal>
   <exif:ExposureBiasValue>0/1</exif:ExposureBiasValue>
   <exif:MaxApertureValue>496875/100000</exif:MaxApertureValue>
   <exif:MeteringMode>2</exif:MeteringMode>
   <exif:FocalLength>55/1</exif:FocalLength>
   <exif:ExifVersion>0221</exif:ExifVersion>
   <exif:DateTimeDigitized>2006-04-27T09:58:40-03:00</exif:DateTimeDigitized>
   <exif:PixelXDimension>3072</exif:PixelXDimension>
   <exif:PixelYDimension>2048</exif:PixelYDimension>
   <exif:ISOSpeedRatings>
    <rdf:Seq>

And it's quite longer. However, the file size is 3 KB.

Okay, if you change the location of the XMP (or delete it), the RAW adjustments are lost, so they should remain in the same folder where the pictures are stored. Each time you create a new Library in Adobe Lightroom and import pictures to that new Library, LR reads the XMP information for each picture and applies that info to the proper images and accordingly, and that way, you never lose your adjustments (unless you lose the XMP File). This is why is much easier in Lightroom importing adjustments from a Library to another if needed a heavy clean up. You can delete your catalog of pictures entirely, then import it again, to a new Library for example, and LR will apply the same adjustments to the "new" pictures by using the XMP files.

In order to activate this XMP feature, you should go to Catalog Preferences (or Settings), chose the Metadata Tab and check "Write changes automatically to XMP". From there, LR will automatically write XMP files for all your pictures, from the imported to the ones you're going to import.

Ø3

[john beardsworth]

That bit of the xmp file is only the EXIF information, but the "quite longer" bit also includes all your adjustment values and IPTC data. So you could just move the images and the sidecars to another machine, and import them into a Lightroom library and you'd have moved most of your work. Only "most" though, because the xmp doesn't contain stacking info, history, virtual copies (versions), pick flags, collection membership. So it's really better to use Lightroom's equivalent of File→Export→Project as new Library, ie File > Export as Catalog.

By contrast, while Aperture can generate xmp sidecars when it exports (duplicates) masters, the sidecar file doesn't contain any adjustment data. So in Aperture you have to go down the File→Export→Project as new Library route.