First Impression: Migration of Aperture to Photos app

The new OS X Photos app is finally here, at least in form of a Beta, which shipped as part of OS X 10.10.3 (Beta).

Good-bye Aperture

I have been a satisfied Aperture user for many years, but once iOS 8 and the iCloud Photo Library were released (the latter one is officially still in public Beta stage), the gap between iOS and OS X became pretty clear.

For example, photos taken on iOS would still upload to Photo Stream (and thus import into Aperture) but unfortunately without any of the edits made in iOS. I take a lot of picture on my iPhone these days and edit them right away, deleting bad shots and applying filters or color corrections right in the iOS Photos app. Neither deletions nor edits are replicated via Photo Stream, so I would end up with duplicate and unedited photos in Aperture. You can find more about my concerns in my previous post. Consequently, I couldn’t wait to finally make the jump to Photos, even though the Photos app lacks some critical features in regards to photo management and editing. However, for me, as a hobby photographer, the pros outweigh the cons.

Migrating Aperture to Photos

When the Photos app is first started, it asks if you want to migrate an iPhoto or Aperture library. I said No, so I could first see what the new app had to offer. I enabled iCloud Photo Library and all sharing features and played around a bit until I was satisfied with the user interface. Knowing that I had several backups of my Aperture library, I restarted the Photos app, while holding down the OPTION key. That allowed me to open a different photo library. I selected my Aperture library and got a dialog telling me that my Aperture library was locked and needed to be repaired or something before it could be migrated. I agreed and let Photos do its thing. Shortly after, I could see all my 40k+ photos from Aperture.

Importing an Aperture library doesn’t duplicate any images, it just references them. That’s one of the good pieces of information I got from reading the Photos Q&A over at Macworld.com.

Photo Library vs. System Photo Library

After importing my Aperture Library into a new Photos library, I had two Photo libraries – the System Photo Library, which was created the first time I started the app and my Aperture-migrated library. In order to enable iCloud Photo Library in the Aperture-migrated library, I had to make it a System Photo Library. Once done, I deleted the “old” System Photo Library, which didn’t contain anything that wasn’t already in the iCloud Photo Library.

Referenced Aperture Library

I have a referenced Aperture library, as opposed to a managed one. That means that all my master images live outside of Aperture, on an external RAID and not on my internal hard disk. So I was wondering what that would do to Photos in terms of migration. Fortunately Photos had an answer for me. As soon as I made the migrated library my Photo System Library (see above), I was told that I had to consolidate my photos first, before Photos would upload them to iCloud. That meant, that Photos had to copy all referenced photos into the Photos library using the File –> Consolidate… command.

Where are all my Projects and Albums?

After the import from Aperture I noticed that none of my organizational structure was visible in Photos. All I could see were 4 tabs called Photos, Shared, Albums (where I expected my Projects and Albums from Aperture) and Projects.

Even though I’m OK with the Years and Moments display on my iPhone and iPad, I got a bit of a panic attack, not seeing my photos properly organized. I could not see myself finding specific photos without proper organization by Year, Month, Project or Album.

Fortunately my organizational structure was only a click away. View –> Show Sidebar revealed, among other things, my folder structure inside of a folder called iPhoto Events. Enabling the sidebar does however hide the Photos, Shared, Albums, Project tabs – so it is either/or.

Crashes

During the consolidation I ran into the first isour. Photos would just repeatedly crash during the consolidation process. So I decided to wait with the consolidation until later.

I have also noticed that Photos often gets stuck while uploading photos to iCloud. Disabling and re-enabling the iCloud Photo Library seems to help.

As of this writing I have about 4k photos pending for upload and 30k pending for consolidation. I’ll let Photos finish the upload first before trying another round of consolidation. If that doesn’t work, I’ll just wait until the next Beta comes around, which hopefully fixes a bunch of those issues.

Keyword Management

The Photos app was not built around keyword management. I have hundreds of keywords that were brought over from Aperture but Photos’ Keyword Manager, in its current implementation just doesn’t work very well for that many keywords. There is no way to search and select certain keywords but instead you have to scroll to find the keyword you are looking for. That’s horrible and I hope Apple adds at least a search field, so keywords can be applied quickly.

What I do like is the fact that keywords auto-complete when adding keywords to individual photos, so you’re less likely to end up with 5 different spellings for the same keyword (which was a huge problem in Aperture).

Wish list

One major feature that I hope Apple will add at some point is the ability to automatically share photos among family members as part of Family Sharing. Both my wife and I take a lot of pictures and in the past I would import her camera roll into Aperture on a weekly basis, so that I would have all the photos she took of our daughter. That’s important for when we want to create a slide show or photo book. However I don’t really want to end up with a lot of duplicate photos between both our photo libraries. Instead I would like to just access her photo library for when I want to create a slide show or photo book.

Summary

The Photos app needs some more work but what I have seen so far looks promising. I do believe that I’ll be OK not having all the bells and whistles that Aperture has but instead benefit from the fact that I have access to all my photos from any device. That’s a huge convenience factor for me.