After Apple announced that Aperture is no longer developed, many photographers are faced with the problem that they have to decide which horse you will bet on in the future. My recommendation is still Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, which is currently in version 5 and can be had for a little more than 100 EUR.
I switched from Aperture to Lightroom a long time ago and was looking for a way to move my photos without learning the RAW settings, tags and meta data. Unfortunately, there is no 1: 1 move with an Aperture-to-Lightroom converter, but I would be happy to describe how to proceed to get the most important data.
I have Apple Aperture Version 3.5.1 and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5.5. For this reason, my information relates to menu items and functions that are contained in these versions of the programs. There may be small changes when working with other versions.
Chapter in this post:
Instructions for exporting from Aperture
Via the menu item "Export" -> "Originals" you get to an export dialog in which you can specify how the data is output to Aperture. In this dialog I have set the folder structure to "Year/Month" because I also work with this setting in Lightroom. Of course, everyone can set this up as they find it suitable for their administration.
It is also important that you also select an output in an “IPTC4XMP sidecar file” in the “Metadata” option in this dialog. I left the rest as it was. After clicking the "Export Originals" button, Aperture then stores the photos accordingly.
I have read that with older Aperture versions it is not possible to export folder structures that are deeper than one level. The users of these versions seem to have to make do by exporting the folders individually and thus circumvent the limit. In Aperture 3, everything happened in one step.
Instructions for importing into Lightroom 5
The next step is to import the data into Lightroom. The adjustments like the star rating, tags and simple edits like crops and rotations are taken from the XMP data. Just in case, I also exported the working copies as TIFF and also imported them into Lightroom so that I still have the finished photo available if Aperture is no longer supported by a future OS X.
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Jens has been running the blog since 2012. He acts as Sir Apfelot for his readers and helps them with technical problems. In his spare time he rides electric unicycles, takes photos (preferably with the iPhone, of course), climbs around in the Hessian mountains or hikes with the family. His articles deal with Apple products, news from the world of drones or solutions to current bugs.