Please reassure me one last time before I make the move from Aperture to LR3.

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mistyp11

mistyp11

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Ok, seriously have been trying to to do this for month, and every time I get ready to do it, something happens to scare me away from LR. I am doing it though, and I am doing it today!

I have a manged Aperture library right now. I have a totally empty and reformatted hard drive. I am going to use the "relocate masters" function of Aperture to move all of my photos on to this external hard drive. I am going to have a parent folder, and then within that folder I will have the following structure:

2008
01_2008
02_2008

and so on.... So a Year folder, and then 12 folders within each year folder for each month, named as above so they stay in numerical order. After I have relocated all of the masters, I am going to "Add" them all to Lightroom. I know they will be in Lightroom without the edits I have completed in Aperture, but I should be able to access the photos with edit by going to them through Aperture as a referenced library. And everything going forward I will copy (or copy as DNG, that I have not decided about) into Lightroom, and edit in Lightroom, etc.

So am I missing anything? Let me know if I am not getting something and am creating an unforseen problem for myself.
 
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Sounds right as far as ensuring everything can be read in LR and not burning your bridges in Aperture. You've not said anything about keywords and other IPTC data - there's a function in Aperture to save it back to the files, but watch out as I think it writes directly to raw files (maybe I've forgotten a way to save sidecars)

If you've not already done it, what about a test run with a few images?

John
 
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For the date hierarchy, use yyyy-mm-dd as in 2011-09-05 so that your folders list nicely in date order. I have, 1st level 2011, 2nd level 2011-09, 3rd level 2011-09-05. I have set up an import pre-set to use the yyyy-mm-dd format, to copy as DNG and save a second copy to another drive. That way I have the DNGs nicely catalogues and ready for processing and the photos in the original format dumped on another drive to act as a last resort backup.
 
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When I moved from Aperture I found the best way was to export the originals into an automated date hierarchy of folders that also matched my LR folder import hierarchy preset. You can also select the sidecar option so that all your ratings and key words get exposed too. This left all the Aperture stuff behind so it was still useable and completely separate. Then I imported into LR using the 'add' option which is really quick as no images have to be moved or copied.

Future imports continue to create the dated folder structure and so carry on where the transition left off.

example ../Lightroom Photos/2011/02-19
 
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BobT said:
For the date hierarchy, use yyyy-mm-dd as in 2011-09-05 so that your folders list nicely in date order. I have, 1st level 2011, 2nd level 2011-09, 3rd level 2011-09-05. I have set up an import pre-set to use the yyyy-mm-dd format, to copy as DNG and save a second copy to another drive. That way I have the DNGs nicely catalogues and ready for processing and the photos in the original format dumped on another drive to act as a last resort backup.
Click to expand...

I would concur with Bob about the date hierarchy. but, how many levels deep really depends on how often you shoot. As I only shoot a few days per month, I have a year folder, and beneath that I have folders that show the year-month-day (i.e. Photos/2011/20110906). It just did not make sense to have month folders when some would only have one or two subfoders, and some might even be empty. On the other hand, if you are a daily shooter, it clearly makes sense to have day folders beneath month folders. YMMV.

--Ken
 
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