Lightroom for Aperture Users: Organizing
Live Training Session 202
Lightroom for Aperture Users: Organizing
Live Training Session 202
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Go to shopping cart »Live Training Session 202, the second in the “Lightroom for Aperture Users” series, is all about organizing. We compare Aperture's Projects, Albums and Folders to Lightroom's Folders, Collection Sets and Collections. We also outline how to have the most “Aperture-like” workflow in Lightroom, starting from import. There are significant, fundamental differences in how files are handled and organized between the two apps, but with a little planning it is possible to have a near-Aperture experience.
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Lightroom for Aperture Users: Organizing
Live Training Session 202
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Reviews
on December 22, 2016 - 3:14am
Joseph,
I’ve been on LR for about a year now… but largely let it languish. I am now going through your videos to catch up on using LR, so that I can get my DAM up to date. I did convert my Aperture library to LR. I’ve been importing new work into LR, but I have not been keeping up to date on all the metadata that I provide (keywords, location, ratings, etc).
I am really confused about two of your suggestions:
1) Not to migrate your entire library from Aperture to LR. Maybe that is OK for a professional photographer who tends to work on projects… and then after the project is complete, it can be archived. However many of us are more of the prosumer category, and expect our DAM to allow all of our pictures to be searchable. For example… I want a smart collection all of my pictures ever taken at my Seaside beach condo at any Christmas… with particular (key worded) people. Having the pictures scattered across two two different applications, Aperture for pre-2015 photos, and LR for photos 2015 and later… seems to kill most of the functionality of having a DAM in the first place. I think your suggestion is excluding an important subset of your audience.
2) I personally think it is generally poor advice to continue using an obsolete application (Aperture), even if you follow your advice to essentially mothball a system with an old version of OSX that still supports Aperture. It seems to me that if something happens to that system, you run the risk of never being able to migrate all of the organization that you put into that library. For me… that is many 100’s of hours of work. Of course, I will not lose my originals… but I do not want to risk losing all the work going back to the inception of my photography hobby.
/Jim
/Jim Pappas
on December 23, 2016 - 4:55pm
Hi Jim, thanks for writing and great questions.
1. The primary reasons I advise not to migrate your Aperture library are a) because the migration is rubbish, and you will lose a ton of work, and b) the migration may get better in the future or third party tools will emerge that will make it better, such as Aperture Expoerter https://photoapps.expert/tips/2016/11/30/twip-apps-19-aperture-exporter-…, c) or you may decide Lightroom isn't for you and that you want to go somewhere else.
If you've made the decision, for sure, that Lightroom is where you'll stay, then go for it. Just be wary of the limitations.
2) As of today (end of 2016), Aperture still runs nearly perfectly well on the current macOS. There are occasional reports of scattered broken features, but so far most of those have been resolved with a preferences trash or a library repair/rebuild. As far as I know, color soft proofing is still broken but that's about it. So it's not like I'm advocating mothballing a ten year old Mac that's on its last legs. And that is an absolute end-of-days scenario. You can buy a Mac today, put Aperture on it via the App Store (at least I think you still can… I haven't bought a Mac in a while but I haven't heard otherwise), and still run Aperture. Plus, absolute WORST case scenario, and Aperture can not launch, can't be installed, etc., remember that your Aperture library will open into Photos.app flawlessly. That's what it's designed to do. You won't have access to missing feature of course, but the actual image rendering and metadata will all be there. Heck, in the worst worst worst case scenario, you can open the library package and extract your RAW files.
So ultimately… if you are confident that Lightroom is your new home (or any app), and you don't mind what you'll lose in the transfer process, then go for it. But be 100% sure… because there's no going back.
@PhotoJoseph
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on December 10, 2016 - 9:15pm
Joseph,
I just saw a tip about creating Collections. You can drag from a Folder into Collections and it will create a Collection with the same name! I haven’t checked it out with a new import yet but a couple of experimental tries and it appears to work.
Susan
on December 10, 2016 - 9:21pm
Oh yeah, that's a great tip. We covered it here, to: https://photoapps.expert/tips/2016/6/27/creating-lightroom-collections-f…
@PhotoJoseph
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on October 2, 2016 - 7:50pm
Hi Joseph,
Thank you for the training sessions. I watched many of your excellent Aperture training videos a few years ago which made me an avid and happy Aperture user, but I am now weighing the decision wether or not to switch to Lightroom (very reluctantly). I noticed that, at the end of this video, you said there had been a Live Training Session (number 200) discussing migrating or not migrating from Aperture to Lightroom. You also mentioned a blog post about the subject.
- I can’t seem to find either Session 200 or the blog post
Also Sessions 204 and 205 are nowhere to be found in the Store..?
Thanks in advance for your help.
on October 3, 2016 - 8:37pm
Olivia,
Thank you for the kudos; I'm glad you've been enjoying the training.
Live Training 200 is here. Don't know why that isn't listed in the store; how odd. I'll fix that.
As for 204 and 205, those are in the store. They are sorted by order of posting and there's a 301 between 205 and 206, so perhaps that's why you missed it. Regardless, here you go: 204 and 205.
@PhotoJoseph
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on August 1, 2016 - 12:09am
Hi’ there…
Since I’ve gotten a new computer and I can no longer install Aperture (can I?), then I decided to finally move over to Lightroom. My Aperture library is for some reason an iPhoto Library, even though I’ve always worked with it within Aperture. So I’ve moved that whole libraryfile to an external harddrive and are right now in the process of importing the whole library in Lightroom on the new computer.
I can see that Lightroom is creating a folder structure with year / month / date for all my photos. So aparently all the project names will not be a part of the new folder structure… I guess I have to clean up all the folders afterwards and try to rebuild the structure I had in Aperture. With about 40.000 photos that’s bound to take quite some time I quess. But hey - I force myself so look through all my photos again - which I suppose isn’t really so bad…
When I go through creating the folder structure I want, is it then possible to create all the collections really easy afterwards in a few simple steps - or do I have to manually create a collection by right clicking on each and every folder?
You mentioned in an earlier comment, that you would never move your library from aperture to Lightroom (if I understood you correctly). Why? My library almost only consist of family photos from the last 10-12 years. I want to continue building that library, so that all my family photos are gathered in that same specific library. I don’t see an alternative option to moving my library from Aperture to Lightroom? Am I going about this in a wrong way? Is there a better solution?
By the way - I learned Apterture thanks to your great tutorials a few years back and I’m so pleased that I can now learn Lightroom with you the same way! ;-) Looking forward to this journey!
Thanks
Thomas, Denmark…
on June 5, 2016 - 2:37pm
I have been following Aperture Expert for a number of years and delighted Joseph has decided to run some tutorials on moving to Lightroom.
I am amazed that you do not wish to address transferring Aperture Library to LR. There is a huge demand for a concise and tested method and very little support out there for Aperture users.
I appreciate this may not be your preferred route, but like a number of Aperture Users left high and dry by Apple, truly hope this is something you will consider in the near future.
At least put it out there and see what response you receive.
Thank you.
macgeth
on June 7, 2016 - 12:43am
Geth,
Again, thank you for your feedback. I have chosen not to go this route, nor to recommend this route, because I think it's a sh** option. I don't want to teach someone how to do something that I myself refuse to do.
There my be better transfer options in the future, but for now, I won't do it myself, so I won't recommend my viewers do it, either.
For those who really, really want to do it, I've referenced a few options. Most recently there's “Using Aperture Exporter to Move Library from Aperture to Lightroom CC/6”.
@PhotoJoseph
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on May 10, 2016 - 9:20pm
Could you make the “_allphotos” collection a smart collection referencing the masters folder in the edit smart collection window? That way it will always represent the “masters” folder in Lr Folders section.
on June 7, 2016 - 1:08am
I saw this and knew I had to think about it… then never responded. Apologies for that!
OK, yes you can make a Smart Collection reference a Folder, but then you can't make another Smart Collection that references that Smart Collection.
So if the goal is to build Smart Collections that do things like look for all three star images from that shoot, then this won't do it… because even though you can create the Smart Collection to show all images from that shoot, you can't make another one to pull from there.
If I'm misunderstanding your suggestion, let me know… your comment got me excited that I had missed something good!
@PhotoJoseph
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on April 29, 2016 - 9:45pm
Great job: So as I understand it in Collections if I import as a virtual copy I am getting a separate file to make adjustments to. The original file in my LR Originals is untouched. If import (without virtual) the changes made in the collection are also seen in my LR Originals folder. Yes?
on April 29, 2016 - 9:51pm
Not quite… the Original originals… meaning the file that is in the Finder… will never be touched by Lightroom. Like with Aperture, that file is sacred. To alter that file, you would have to open it in Photoshop and save over the original. And if you're talking about a RAW file, you can't actually save over a RAW file without trying really, really hard. Once you open a RAW file in any app, then hit save, it is no longer RAW so can't be saved over the RAW file.
The purpose of the “virtual copy” is so that you can have multiple versions of that image in Lightroom. They all point to the same original in the Finder, and what you're looking at in Lightroom is just a rendering of that original file plus whatever adjustments you've made to it. The adjustments are simply instructions that the app reads, then follows, every time you look at the photo.
This changes if you open in an external editor; at that point you will be rendering a NEW file, an actual file (TIF or PSD typically) from Lightroom and sending that to another app. Then when you hit save in that app, it will overwrite the TIF or PSD that was just generated by Lightroom. That's the way it's supposed to work, and that way the edited image shows up back in Lightroom (which is what you want). But the original is still there in Lightroom as well.
Does that help?
@PhotoJoseph
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