I had time today to look at this problem again. The behavior in Aperture 3 is stranger than I expected.
The files I am trying to move are from a trip where I took around 3500 pictures, and friends took a few hundred. On import into Aperture, the date and time stamps of my pictures somehow became scrambled. Using a combination of Aperture's “Adjust Date and Time” and “Batch Change” I adjusted everything to the correct times. I did not use “Also change original file” while I finished the adjustments because I did not want to be changing the files multiple times.
When I had everything in order I selected all the pictures. I then used “Adjust Date and Time” to change the time by one second, and selected “Also change original file”. After this the pictures reverted to the scrambled order! It appears that instead of adjusting based on the time stored in Aperture, the date in the files is used, and then the new time is read into Aperture. Very frustrating.
When I read the pictures into Aperture originally I renamed the files based on the date and time. The times used were the incorrect times. The original file names from the camera are stored in the Aperture field under "Version Name”, and I can use these to sort the pictures I took into the correct sequence. The pictures my friends took all have different sequences so I still cannot sort everything together. The “Version Name” does not appear to transfer to Lightroom, so I am not able to use this to sort after transferring.
A large percentage of these pictures were geotagged before importing into Aperture. Theoretically, it would be possible to read the location data in the pictures and match them to the GPS track log to find the time. I did this manually to verify some of the times. I am not aware of a tool that automates this process. I also just realized that the GPS tags do not transfer from Aperture to Lightroom with out significant extra work.
I am not sure what to try next. Any ideas?