Hi,
I previously had just iPhoto but purchased aperture 3.3. I am using the unified library on mountain lion now. I did not/do not have any separate aperture library, so aperture is only looking at my “iphoto” library at this point. All is working fine so far but I cannot figure out sharing to other apps via Aperture.
Example: if I go to iTunes–>Advanced–>choose photos to share and choose Aperture it will tell me it cannot find the library. I have previews enabled, and whenever I close Aperture it tells me it is updating previews or some such. As a test I created a new dummy library within aperture with 1 photo. This is recognized.
Similarly, if I go to iMovie in the video source pane there is a new “Aperture videos” above iPhoto Videos, and in the photo browser there is also Aperture as a source, but both are empty whenever Aperture is pointed at the iPhoto library. If I choose the dummy library then that appears to work.
So it seems then that even though both programs use the same library, other iLife apps/Media browser only think that iPhoto “owns” it. My question is whether this is expected behavior? Thanks for any help!
Owen,
All is not what it appears to be. The new “unified” photo libraries are actually unique to each app. If you have your system set to show file extensions you’d see that the iPhoto library filename extension is .photolibrary and the Aperture library filename extension is .aplibrary. If you view the info for each in the Finder you’ll see it reports them as “Photo Library” and “Aperture Library” respectively.
While each app can open the other’s library, there are unique features in each app that the other app either ignores or doesn’t allow you to edit when opening each other’s library. For example, you can view iPhoto calendars in Aperture but you cannot edit them.
So when you select iPhoto or Aperture in any of the media sharing dialogs, you are actually shown only the last iPhoto library (with .photolibrary extension) or the last Aperture library (with .aplibrary extension) that was opened by each respective app.
Bottom line is even if you use Aperture to edit an iPhoto library, you must select iPhoto in the media sharing dialogs to get the contents of that library.
There may be limitations with sharing iPhoto library images that were edited using Aperture. I’m only saying it’s possible since I haven’t looked into it nor read anything about it happening. Just something to think of if you make some edits in Aperture of your iPhoto library and you don’t see them in the media browser dialog for iPhoto.
Thomas