Migrating metadata from Aperture to Lightroom

Pindy

Perhaps one of you can help.

I'm about 90% decided to switch. Since I've done a considerable amount of work in Aperture, I would like to at least salvage my ratings and keywording. Is there a good way to do this that's not insanely time consuming?

All the photos (about ten thousand of them) are already imported into Lightroom, and they are sharing the RAW files. I suppose I could make sidecars, but wouldn't that include having to make exports of all photos as well? I don't believe sidecar creation can be done à la carte, as it were.

Even if I could, would Lightroom be able to import and apply the sidecars to existing files? Somehow I doubt it.

Lightroom has the feature of writing metadata to XMP, which seems like it would work the other direction, but I'm not sure.

Thanks!

arodney

IF (big if) you can get Aperture to handle you files as DNG's, you should be able to at least keep most of the data and carry it over to LR.

Pindy

arodney wrote:

IF (big if) you can get Aperture to handle you files as DNG's, you should be able to at least keep most of the data and carry it over to LR.

I would then, presumably, have to re-import the files into LR and manually SYNC the adjustments onto the newly-imported DNGs?

I realise I'm probably goign to have to start over here (weeping)

arodney

Pindy wrote:

I would then, presumably, have to re-import the files into LR and manually SYNC the adjustments onto the newly-imported DNGs?

I realise I'm probably goign to have to start over here (weeping)

If you're referring to rendering instructions, you're out of luck, they will never sync. If you're referring to metadata like copyright info, maybe keywords, it might work. But I suspect you'll end up weeping a bit.

Pindy

arodney wrote:

If you're referring to rendering instructions, you're out of luck, they will never sync. If you're referring to metadata like copyright info, maybe keywords, it might work. But I suspect you'll end up weeping a bit.

yeah, I meant syncing the metadata from the newly imported DNG to the existing RAW that has adjustments.

well, this is something I will hopefully suffer only once.

CatOne

If you export the masters you can tell it to export XMP metadata, and it will create sidecar files.

Note, this only works for RAW files when importing into Lightroom. Aperture will export XMP files for all file types (JPEG, RAW, TIFF, etc.) but LR will only read XMP sidecar files for RAW files.

But for RAW files this works great -- export from Aperture and import into LR. I did this and all my keywords and ratings came across just fine.

And no need to use DNG files for this. I doubt that would actually work, given Aperture won't write anything *into* the DNG files. I don't know how LR works when you try to give it a DNG file and associated XMP sidecar. I suspect it would treat it (wrongly) as it does JPEG and TIFF files... that is to ignore it.

Pindy

Thanks CatOne.

My initial test proved you right. The trouble is, unfortunately, that you cannot export only XMPs. I think this whole thing is going to be a major PITA but I thank you for your help. I've just started keywording in earnest in LR. Luckily, my keywording in Aperture was incomplete and half-assed, so I don't really mind starting over there. It's the star ratings I really wanted to keep track of, but I've printed out mini proofs of those, so it won't be too hard to do it by hand.

I'll be done, I think, in February!