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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.

Hey Lucien,

Thanks so much for posting info! My local Apple retailer doesn’t yet have their store copies and your insights are great! Thanks.

Two questions:

1) Is there any option for selecting a drive that your library resides on? If the Macintosh HD is the default and only option, that’s crippling to pros who process thousands of images a week!

2) Can you speak on exporting images to JPEG? Is it possible to select any number of RAW images and have them process in the background while you continue to work? And how fast is it?

Thanks again!
-Noel

Do you have any idea what “badges” are in Aperture or what each “badge icon” represents? No one at Apple support could answer my question without a charging me $199.00 per hour for “Feature” support! and I can’t find anything remotely relative to it in any Aperture documentation or help files. Thanks!… Sarah

is appeture a free program? how does it differ from iphoto??

Thanks for the informative “stuff” on Aperture. Look forward to checking in once in awhile…

Jay

[...] Update 2: I posted another entry on iPhoto import, and a small look inside the file. [...]