Merging Aperture library to iCloud Photos?

[talhasyed]

With the imminent full deprecation of Aperture in Catalina, I am finally looking to migrate off of Aperture.

For my needs, even with the very limited editing controls in Photos.app, using Photos with iCloud Photos is the best compromise for me (compared to Lightroom, Capture One), especially since I have an iPhone as well.

I know there is a way to open Aperture/iPhoto libraries in Photos, but can you then merge said library to your main iCloud Photos library?

I would like to maintain lossless editing capabilities, and would like to avoid importing JPEGs of all my edits from Aperture.

 

[steve123]

I am not certain about how to sync your aperture library ... I am in the same boat. For editing, have a look at Raw Power. You can get it as a Mac app and iOS app. Similar to Aperture for editing but uses Photos for storage. Not sure if the developer will add DAM functionality ... I think the developer is considering it.

 

[Ledgem]

I recently went through this as well. I had a bunch of old photos (RAWs, JPEGs, and adjusted RAWs) in Aperture that I wanted to get out and into Photos. I guess when I first ran Photos I told it to build off of my iPhoto library, rather than my Aperture library.

As you've probably read, if you make a new Photos database then it should prompt you about taking over an iPhoto or Aperture database. It's possible that I missed a good solution, but Photos - being very consumer-oriented - is missing the feature of being able to merge multiple databases. And that's what I believe you're asking about: how to combine a Photos database that has all of Aperture's things with your existing Photos database. Unfortunately, it seems to be impossible at present.

I've been manually going through my Aperture library, exporting the originals and occasionally the processed JPEGs, and then importing them into Photos and manually building the same folder/album structure. I have a few years' worth of photos in Aperture, so it's relatively slow going. On the bright side, it's a nice excuse to look over many of those old photos once more. Also interesting to me was discovering a small handful of photos that were corrupt or somehow inaccessible within Aperture. I tried some of the fixes suggested online, but they didn't work. Good thing I had used the Vault backup system before, and was able to restore the photos that way... not sure what happened there.