Kris,

Welcome to Aperture and ApertureExpert. I’m sorry that your first experience hasn’t been great :( Hopefully we can answer some of your questions and get you on a better path here.

Unfortunately your desire to have a shared library between Aperture and Lightroom isn’t really going to work out very well. As you’ve already noticed, Aperture isn’t going to update whenever your partner has altered a photo in Lightroom, or vice-versa, for two reasons. First, the changes made in either app are non-destructive which means that they don’t even exist outside of the host application until they are exported. Second, even if your partner exported every change as a new version from Lightroom, Aperture wouldn’t auto-update and see the new version without you manually importing them.

I don’t see an ideal situation where you can both use the same collection of photos across two different apps that won’t end in frustration. Even if she was using Aperture, there still isn’t a perfect solution. Unfortunately Aperture isn’t set up for multi-users, yet it’s something we’re all hoping to see in a future update. There are very viable and livable workarounds if you’re both using Aperture, but it does require a bit of effort on your parts. Essentially, you’re relegated to keeping the Aperture Library and Masters on a removable drive (FireWire, or if you both have new Macs, then Thunderbolt) and sneaker-netting the drive between your computers.

Using a network drive (NAS) works in theory, but there are limitations, and you can not put the Aperture Library itself on the NAS. Check out this article “Network Drives (NAS) and Aperture” and also dig through the forums here if you’re interested in learning more.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s tackle your iPhoto import problem. The crashing Aperture is likely caused be a corrupt or unsupported file that’s hiding in your iPhoto Library. I suggest you start from scratch, and instead of importing the entire iPhoto Library at once, import piece by piece.

To start from scratch, create a new Aperture Library from File > Switch to Library > Other/New….

Then to import, instead of choosing File > Import > iPhoto Library, choose File > Import > Show iPhoto Browser, then drag iPhoto “Events” into Aperture. You can create a folder in Aperture called “iPhoto” to drag them into just to keep things organized, and you can shift-click to select multiple Events to import at once. You said you have 3,000 photos, so I’d guess there aren’t too many Events in iPhoto. It may sound tedious but it shouldn’t take too long to do. Just grab maybe five or ten Events at a time, and if at one point it crashes, try again with fewer Events, etc. etc. until you figure out where the problem is hiding. Keep in mind that you may have more than one problem file hiding in iPhoto.

Another difference that this will make is that you will be creating a “managed” Library, which means that the Master files are all stored inside the Aperture Library. You can move them later on using the Relocate Masters command, but for now, go ahead and import into the Library itself. Another reason I’m suggesting this is that importing from iPhoto to Aperture directly to the NAS could possibly be causing a problem in itself.

Break it down into steps instead of trying to do it all at once, and isolate the problem.

That’s my advice for ya. Also if you haven’t already, you may want to read up on both of my ebooks, “ApertureExpert’s 15 Tips on File Management in Aperture 3” and “In-Depth Getting Started with Aperture 3”, or if you prefer video training, there’s the “Live Training” and the “Learn by Video”, all available in the store.