Aperture/iPhoto together

Everyone's workflow is different, but I do this;

• I store all of my photos on an external firewire 800 harddrive.
• I reference them in Aperture, but keep the aperture library on my MBP, - this means previews are always available on my Mac, even if the external hdd isn't attached.
• In iPhoto I use the 'show aperture library' function to drag some selected libraries into iPhoto (copy items to the iPhoto library turned OFF) - these will reference the images stored in Aperture, meaning if I edit an image in Aperture the changes are reflected in iPhoto.

This allows me to use the iPhoto 09 functions (facial recognition, places, etc) for the more 'family friendly' shots whilst my serious photography remains solely in Aperture.

Hope that made some kind of sense.

More tips here.

bking1000 said:

Exploring Aperture, and already an iPhoto user.

I can access the iPhoto library from Aperture (both see the pictures and "import" the entire library). I can also see the Aperture folders from within iPhoto with some sort of "aperture viewer", but what I'm wondering about is: if I am doing versions within Aperture -- for cropping, color, etc. -- what is the best way to get this into iPhoto?

Is it to just export from Aperture onto the desktop, then import into iPhoto, or is there a different way (i.e. straight from an interface within iPhoto).

I've got a bunch of photos already in iPhoto, that I am referencing from Aperture (didn't pull into the Ap library). Besides the inability to vault those photos, are there any issues with referencing the originals from Aperture looking at the iPhoto library folders?

Click to expand...

It's the expected functionality in my experience. But I only want the 'final' version in iPhoto - all of my editing and versioning is done in Aperture and changes are reflected in iPhoto.

bking1000 said:

When you "show aperture library" in iPhoto, I don't see versions in a stack. One of the reasons I'm thinking of moving to Ap is for stacks and version management. In the "show ap lib" I only see the top photo from each stack. Is that expected functionality?

Click to expand...

In iPhoto, go to preferences aqnd set Aperture to be your external editor. When you open a photo to edit, Aperture opens, you edit, save, and it saves right back in iPhoto where it should be.

Thumbnails?

I have been thinking about changing how I use both these programs together and have a question.

I am currently using both iPhoto and Aperture and it's getting to be inefficient now that I'm accumulating a lot more pictures. I had about 4500 pictures stored in iPhoto from the past six or seven years. My photography has increased greatly in the past year and I've taken 2000+ pictures in RAW. I decided to use Aperture to edit and store the pictures, and I've been exporting JPEGs which are then imported into iPhoto.

This results in 2 copies of each file stored on my computer, which is a waste of space.

I prefer iPhoto for organizing and viewing my photos and Aperture for editing. It leads to me to believe i have 2 options to maximize hard drive space and get what I want out of both programs.

Option 1: Import RAW files into Aperture, edit, and then export as JPEG. Import JPEG files into iPhoto and organize & view to my heart's content. That's where I'm at now. I could continue this workflow and to save hard drive space, move my RAW masters to an external drive and keep them as referenced files in Aperture. Now I've reclaimed most of the hard drive space that is being doubled up by the pictures and I can still re-edit whenever I feel the need. But then I most export a new JPEG and import and replace the file in Iphoto. A bit cumbersome, but my lower volume of pictures (2-3 thousand/year) makes it manageable. And the number of pictures that I will re-edit are a small percentage of the total.

Option 2: Move all my pictures to Aperture permanently and create a new iPhoto library. Use "show Aperture library" to drag over all my pictures and set it up so iPhoto does not copy the photos into the library. Then I'm only doubling up on thumbnails but I can organize and view in iPhoto as I please.

I have been leaning toward option 2 and gave it a test run today with a new iPhoto library. That leads me to the following question and reason for my post:

I dragged a project (30 pictures) from Aperture to iPhoto to test the functionality. I organized them and it seemed like a great solution. It was if I had imported the JPEG files, but since it was only the thumbnails the 30 pictures only took up the space of 1 1/2 full JPEGs. I went back into Aperture and heavily edited one picture and deleted another. When I restarted iPhoto, I could see the edited picture's changes when I double clicked on it to open it larger, but the small thumbnail did not reflect the change. In order to get that to happen, I had to rebuild the thumbnails. Also the deleted picture still had a thumbnail and when I click on it I get a message that iPhoto can not find the file.

Do I have to rebuild the thumbnails every time I re-edit pictures in Aperture in order for the changes to be reflected in iPhoto?

Do I have to go and manually delete any picture in iPhoto that I have removed from Aperture?

After playing around with Aperture and iPhoto working together today, I realized my original workflow is best.

Import RAW into Aperture and edit
Export JPEG and import to iPhoto
Move RAW files to an external drive and manage from Aperture

If I decide to re-edit a picture, I will just need to export a new JPEG and replace the photo in iPhoto. This doesn't happen so often so it's not a big deal. Most of my pictures are from family events and of my baby, so once they are processed from the RAW file, they are at their best.

It doesn't make sense to move everything to Aperture and then put things back into iPhoto via "show Aperture library" while not copying to the iPhoto library purely as a space saving function. I end up with low resolution previews in iPhoto, which might be ideal for someone who is only using it to view on a TV or do slideshows, but I prefer having full size JPEGs. To get that, I need to increase the preview to full size in Aperture, which actually takes up more space in the end. For my 6 megapixel D40 pictures, it makes the previews about 1MB. There is a preview in both Aperture and iPhoto so that is 2MB per photo, which is higher than my average of 1.8MB for a JPEG.

For someone that shoots tens of thousands of pictures every year, I'm sure this workflow sounds wasteful and unnecessary. For someone like me, shooting only several thousand pictures and wanting to use Aperture editing and iPhoto sorting/viewing, it's not all that much work.