I have a Photos database that I would like to import all my Aperture photos and videos into. I know I can export the photos out of Aperture and import into Photos but, I want to preserve all the faces and other edits. Is there a way to do this?
I watched the new Photos course which I found very informative but, it did not cover this one question.
Thanks, Jimmy
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Jimmy Woods
It really depends on whether you are doing this to set up your initial Photos library, or whether you already have an existing Photos library and you want to now add photos from Aperture into it.
If this is the initial setup of Photos, then it may ask you when you start up to convert your old library to Photos. If you had an iPhoto library as well, then I'm not sure what it would do. It may have chosen then iPhoto library over the Aperture one, or it may have asked.
If this is later on, and you have two distinct libraries, one in Photos and one in Aperture, then it gets complicated. There is no way to ask Photos to simply import the library. You can easily open the old Aperture library in Photos by Control+clicking on the Aperture library, selecting Open With, and then Photos. But the new library that is created is a separate library from your Photos library. Maybe that works for you.
Otherwise, exporting the image and importing them into Photos is a good option. Yes, you will lose edits, but since the editing functionality is different between the two apps, I'm not sure there is any way around that. I see at least one report of some data being preserved when using the File, Export, Original and choosing to include IPTC Metadata and Keywords from Aperture. Then importing those files. You may want to try that with a small set of photos to see what happens. Experimentation may be the key here for you.
As for Faces, I don't think there is any hope for that. The technology has changed too much, even between versions of Photos itself.
Sorry I can't help you more on this. Aperture has been gone long enough so I don't even have it on my Mac anymore.
Thank you Gary. Your explanation was very helpful. I will use your 'otherwise" suggestion above.
Jimmy