Aperture iPhoto Import & File Format Comments

iPhoto Import

Today I imported my 8200 odd pictures from iPhoto into Aperture. The entire process took about 2 1/2 hours, in the background while I worked. It wasn’t processor hogging at all, Apple evidently designed and coded this part well.

After the import, you can see that the iPhoto albums and rolls all appeared in the Projects area on the left:

You will also see something very nice, the import brought in the fact that I had edited some pictures in iPhoto, and had created Stacks for them. (See the highlighted picture there of me in my wedding tux).

Edited pictures brought in from iPhoto are all tagged with the tag “iPhoto Edited”. Original pictures are tagged with “iPhoto Original”. You’ll see in this example of a picture of Jennifer that has tags “iPhoto Original” and “Jennifer”, one of the tags I had set up in iPhoto.

Aperture File Format Comments

I did some looking at the file format tonight as well. Aperture keeps all of its information in a file package:

Inside of the file package:

There are different files for albums and projects. The actual pictures from iPhoto are all in the Rolls directory, in a large file containing the images for each roll.

That’s it for tonight. If you have anything else you like screen shots or comments on, please let me know. I probably won’t have time to post any more large entries like this until Sunday afternoon, as an FYI to anyone who wants an involved answer. Short questions I think I can handle.