iPhoto to Aperture

[mnbinth]

I'm using iPhoto 9.5.1 and am planning to move to Aperture. I have 30,500 photos and videos so I'm hoping Aperture will be quicker. I also want to start doing some more advanced editing beyond what iPhoto offers. The biggest reason for the transition is I want to be more efficient with space which leads me to my question...

How do I get rid of all the original photos that have been edited and had new files already created? Is it possible to safely do that in iPhoto 9.5.1? If I don't do it now, perhaps there will be a way to do it once I start using Aperture. I know going forward I won't have to worry about this in Aperture but I'm wondering how to deal with everything I've edited in iPhoto over the years. I'm currently using 280gb of space so this could free up a nice chunk of hard drive real estate if you know what I mean. Any thoughts? Much appreciated!

I can't believe they even advertise the reason to switch to Aperture is there are no longer multiple copies of one photo. https://www.apple.com/th/aperture/iphoto-to-aperture/

 

[Weaselboy]

I recently went through the same transition and here is what I did.

From your description is sounds like you are okay with losing the originals and just want to keep the edited "copy" and import that to Aperture to save space? That is what I did.

Just open iPhoto and select Events at the top left. Now select an event and do a command-a to select all. Now go to the File menu and select export.

Now in the export dialogue set everything up exactly like in my screenshot then cllck export and pick a destination. This will export the edited version (or the original if there never was an edit) of all your photos sorted in folders by event name.

Now here is where I went wrong. Aperture says you can use the existing iPhoto library, and you can... but then you don't get the benefit of not having duplicates with original and edited photos. You want to make a NEW Aperture library that is completely empty. Do that by option clicking Aperture and that will bring up a dialogue where you can create a new library.

So now just import those exported photos into the empty Aperture library. Aperture will reindex everything and create "Projects" for each Event folder name you exported from iPhoto and you will be all set.

The resulting Aperture library will be far smaller than the old iPhoto library since you got rid of all those originals. Going forward this will not be an issue as new photos imported and edited do not get duplicated in Aperture like they do in iPhoto.

Once you are sure everything looks good in Aperture you can just delete the iPhoto library and the exported photos. I archived mine to an old external drive.

 

[Traverse]

I recently went through the same transition and here is what I did.

From your description is sounds like you are okay with losing the originals and just want to keep the edited "copy" and import that to Aperture to save space? That is what I did.

Just open iPhoto and select Events at the top left. Now select an event and do a command-a to select all. Now go to the File menu and select export.

Now in the export dialogue set everything up exactly like in my screenshot then cllck export and pick a destination. This will export the edited version (or the original if there never was an edit) of all your photos sorted in folders by event name.

Image

Now here is where I went wrong. Aperture says you can use the existing iPhoto library, and you can... but then you don't get the benefit of not having duplicates with original and edited photos. You want to make a NEW Aperture library that is completely empty. Do that by option clicking Aperture and that will bring up a dialogue where you can create a new library.

So now just import those exported photos into the empty Aperture library. Aperture will reindex everything and create "Projects" for each Event folder name you exported from iPhoto and you will be all set.

The resulting Aperture library will be far smaller than the old iPhoto library since you got rid of all those originals. Going forward this will not be an issue as new photos imported and edited do not get duplicated in Aperture like they do in iPhoto.

Once you are sure everything looks good in Aperture you can just delete the iPhoto library and the exported photos. I archived mine to an old external drive.

Thank you so much for this! You are awesome! In addition to creating a folder of generic pictures as a backup I need to get some "original" unedited versions of certain pictures and couldn't figure how out. Thank you!

 

[maflynn]

Why not use the library that iPhoto created or am I missing something. Aperture and iPhoto share the same library structure so you should be able to just point Aperture to it.

 

[Weaselboy]

Why not use the library that iPhoto created or am I missing something. Aperture and iPhoto share the same library structure so you should be able to just point Aperture to it.

That is true, but that also retains all the original and edited photos from iPhoto, so you have two copies of any photo that was edited, taking far more space. OP specifically said that was his what he wanted to avoid.