My intent is to stick with Aperture until I see where Photos.app is going. Apple has said they will update Aperture to be compatible with Yosemite so that gives me at least 18+ months or longer to see how this plays out. That said, I’m being proactive in testing how I might migrate my images out of Aperture into something else .. likely Lightroom since that is where I came from when I chose Aperture.

Last weekend I selected ALL 46,000+ images in my managed library, and used Relocate Originals to move them into a Referenced folder tree. I chose Folder/Project/OriginalName as the destination path and filename. It took a few hours to run, but it worked. I also consolidated all these originals back into my managed library without any errors or issues. All of this is comforting.

I also tested writing metadata back to originals. That worked for raw files and JPGs. It did not work for PSDs and some TIFFs. What I’ve found is that TIFFs written by Photoshop that include an embedded preview are not writeable by Aperture. That’s a shame. I will have no way to getting all the metadata associated with them over to another tool unless exporting originals with XMP sidecar files managed to get it there. The critical factor there will be whether the target tool will ingest that information. The webinar that I watched on KelbyOne earlier this week indicated that sidebar XMP files for some file formats do not get ingested on import into Lightroom.

Another consideration for anyone looking at moving to another tool. No adjustments and no “versions” get moved over. If you have multiple versions of an image, processed in different ways for different effects or purposes, you will only get those out of Aperture if you export those versions in a baked RGB file format. That’s a bummer, but that would be the case no matter what tools you migrate between.