Moving

Export WITH edits intact? Pretty sure you'll have export your whole library as TIFF's.

It's worth the move though. IMO, Lightroom is far better than Aperture now.

 

My advice would be to start fresh with lightroom & keep things completely separate. I switched from Lightroom4 to Aperture3 about a year ago, but all of my old work from before the switch is still in my Lightroom catalog. If you have both apps anyway then there is really no need to stop using one completely just because you now have the other as well.

If you're absolutely determined to have all of your photographs in one place then you'll need to export all your edited raw files as either JPEGs or TIFFs. There is no way to save your edits into the raw file. It's possible to save some metadata as a sidecar file (such as star ratings, keywords & colour tags) however Aperture & Lightroom can't read exactly the same metadata, so I'd be very careful with all this. The safest option by far is definitely to export your edited files first so you have a version with your changes "baked in".

As for your final point about organizing in aperture & editing in lightroom - in short, no. It may be possible to have both apps using a referenced library & referencing files stored in a particular folder, but any changes in one app would not apply to the other.

Alternatively, if you wanted to use Aperture to manage your files & lightroom to edit, you'd have to set lightroom up as your external image editor. This would mean you could only send TIFF files or PSD files to lightroom for editing, not the original raw.

Hope that makes sense & helps answer your question.

Regards

 

You will need to export all the images from Aperture. Choose a file format you like (tiff or jpg.) These will have the edits but you loose the non-destructive feature. Another words after the export you will never be able to undo your edits. You will need to do a second export to get the un-edited RAW images

But you knw what is going to happen, Apple will release Aperture X and you will then want to move all the image back.

You wil have to re-organize the images as none of the alllbums and slide shows and what not will transfer over.

 

Wait and see if Apple announces an update to Aperture today. There are manu who expect a refresh to Aperture (along with iLife and iWork) with the release of OS X Mavericks. Apple IS aware that there are a number of key features missing in Aperture that Lightroom has had for 2 1/2 versions (lens correction, perspective correction, better highlight/shadow, etc.)

 

If you're not a pro, your edits might matter less than you think they do. But if you really need them, do as the others suggest and export those edits as TIFFs. I would definitely not export them as jpegs, because jpegs can't be edited again without degradation.

As already suggested, do start from scratch with Lightroom. No sense starting off on the wrong foot.

I don't use aperture and consider it non-professional software since it has never been compatible with my medium format digital camera files. Moreover, the first version wasn't even color managed...unbelievable, but true.

 

I have mine set up to do nothing other than note where the raw file is (on an external) upon import (no copying of raws). From there, I edit crop, etc., but I don't save as a tiff or anything else. So it's only the raw files that take up significant space.

 

OP - do not know if you read this thread, started by me in Jan 2013? It contains some really useful advice. Hope this helps

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1520341

 

I have an archive of raw files on a 2 TB hard drive. I organize by camera, photographic subject and my camera organizes by date. Within Lightroom, I don't do any separate organization. I use the organization already on the hard drive (camera, subject, and date).

Note that lightroom picks up on exif data, so you can pretty much search on anything in exif - camera, lens, date, focal length, aperture, etc.