Hello, I just discovered the existence of Aspect from a comment on Reddit.
Is there any way for long-established photographers to migrate libraries from other apps to Aspect, including metadata and edits?
Thank you,
Francis.
Hello Francis,
currently, we don’t have a specific migration/import functionality for Aperture. When importing the contents of an Aperture library, only the images themselves, as well as any possible metadata stored in XMP sidecar files will be imported.
However, the Aperture library format is pretty accessible, so we will take the opportunity and look into how involved it would be to implement an importer that retains as much of the the organization structure as possible. I’ll post again in a few days when we know more.
Thank you very much for your response.
I am very happy to help with QA testing. I was a programmer for over 30 years.
Okay, so although the somewhat different library structure requires some compromises during the conversion, it looks like this is reasonably simple. Our plan is to implement this as an add-on (JavaScript) instead of as a core feature, though. There are some scripting API extensions that will be required first, which the next preview release will include.
I’ll then put the add-on itself on GitHub, so that you can also propose refinements, if you want to.
1.0.0-preview.39 is out and has the required scripting API additions and I’ve uploaded the first version of an Aperture importer add-on to GitHub: GitHub - bildhuus/addon-aperture-import: Provides Aperture library import functionality for Aspect
Installation is still a manual process and it’s still a bit rough around the edges, but it can now successfully import all images from within an Aperture library, also preserving their keywords. Projects will be converted to events and all other objects, such as albums or books, will be converted to collections. The folder structure of the library is also preserved as groups.
There is some work left to do on the remaining metadata (e.g. ratings) and images stored outside of the library are not supported, yet. But the idea is that the import process is additive in the sense that you can run it multiple times without duplicates piling up, so that running it with a later version will only add the new data, without affecting what already exists.
Thank you for the update!
I have over 100,000 images in my library, currently set as referenced files. I have one project per day, grouped into folders per month then per year - this means there are a lot of projects.
If I use Aspect for my library, I assume I will have to create copies of my non-destructive edited Aperture-photos first - which means my library will get very large. I need to do a lot of cleaning up , pronto. I’ve seen a couple of other asset management apps that preserve some of the non-destructive edits.
I will test with a small subset of my photographs.
Thank you.