How to move from Aperture back to iPhoto?

January 18, 2006 4:09 PM

I tried out Apple's Aperture for a month to see if I liked it and if it saved any time, but now that iPhoto 6 is out, I'd like to go back to iPhoto which runs loads faster on my iMac. This means I have about a month's worth of photos in Aperture I'd like to salvage in iPhoto. What I can't figure out is how to export photos from Aperture into iPhoto, instead of vice versa. Any tips?
posted by mathowie to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

You should be able to just drag the Aperture library folder into iPhoto to get the photos themselves (be sure to turn off the pref that tells iPhoto to make copies) but you'll lose all the metadata that way, of course.
posted by kindall at 5:30 PM on January 18, 2006

if that doesnt work you can control or right-click on the aperture library and choose "show package contents" and then drill down to where the actual photos are stored.
posted by joeblough at 6:03 PM on January 18, 2006

Best answer: I figured it out!

I read some of the FAQs that came with aperture, and I ended up using "Export Masters" in each of my photo libraries. This plopped all the jpgs and raw photos into an external folder, which I could then import. The slightly dumb thing was that it also exported the PSD files I did in photoshop, even though I only wanted the original master files, and not the edited versions.
posted by mathowie at 6:48 PM on January 18, 2006

i hate aperture... i'm hoping that adobe's lightroom is much better. aperture's raw conversion performance on high-ISO images is laughable.
posted by joeblough at 7:00 PM on January 18, 2006

Aperture is (potentially) way better than Lightroom, IMO, although I'm not ready to switch to either yet. If you want to feed back about Lightroom you can do so on this thread on the Streetphoto forums, where an Adobe guy (the very cool Wade Heninger) is listening.
posted by unSane at 7:08 PM on January 18, 2006

Matt, you can't export directly into iphoto.

Select your pictures/all projects

File>Export Masters.

You can leave/change the names if you like. This will just copy the masters out.

Then drag & drop into iphoto.
--------------
Using find, it could be even simpler...

Since it's just a month, it's easy to Find
all of the past months photos...and then make a new album. Total time...about 5 min.
posted by filmgeek at 8:05 PM on January 18, 2006

Via TUAW, I hear about something called Aperture2iLife.
posted by mcwetboy at 1:30 PM on January 29, 2006