Aperture to Capture One... work in progress

ChrisR

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For any late newcomers to this thread, I'm editing this initial post. The original appears un-edited below.

The current state of play is that I've pretty much decided to move to Capture One Pro, and have done quite a few experiments along the way, which are documented in this thread. I have bought Capture One Pro Fujifilm 12, and also the eBook that relates to that by Nils Wille Christofferson (see his site here). I bought C1Pro slightly too early to get the free upgrade to C1Pro 20, and I didn't feel like paying for the upgrade until I'd got into the swing of using v12 (I'd also have to upgrade the eBook).

I also bought ApertureExporter, and have done a run of the 2019 library onto a separate disk.

I have changed my 2019 Aperture library from Managed to Referenced, and any new projects are Referenced.

I have imported most of my 2019 library into a C1Pro catalogue, via the process described andreferenced in post #44. I've done a few experiments on how well Aperture adjustments are brought across, which have gradually made me less certain that this is the way to go (not yet documented in the thread). I also confused myself utterly on how to import new images from my Master Images folder on the Mac into the structure created by the import.

These problems (and natural laziness) have meant I didn't start using C1Pro in anger in 2020 as I'd planned. So I've continued using Aperture! :)

However, my 2014 MacBook Pro is developing a few weird glitches, I'm still on Mojave (not High Sierra as I was when this thread started), and the screen has deteriorated with Staingate issues. So I can see a new Mac in my not-too-distant future; if that's based on Apple Silicon, it's less and less likely that the fix that allowed Aperture to work in Catalina will continue to work. And if Aperture doesn't work on a new machine, I'd be in a bit of bother! So I really do need to get my act together and try to start using C1Pro properly in 2021. That probably means rebuilding the C1Pro catalog first.

It helps a bit that I'm a film photographer, so my images arrive in batches, rather than pretty continuously. OTOH I can't fill up a massive SD card while I experiment! Anyway, I've got a bit of time. I just have to make myself do it. One way (I hope) is to document the various steps here. On that basis, it doesn't really matter if no-one else reads this, and there are probably relatively few die-hard Aperture users left to whom it would be relevant anyway. But I hope it might just possibly be relevant to a few others.

If you're new to this thread and want to read about my Aperture to C1Pro experiences (rather than the other diversions along the way), you could probably skip everything up to about post #37.

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I'm an Aperture diehard, though currently exploring alternative non-destructive editors with DAMs. I'm currently running very happily on 10.13 (High Sierra), and I'm resisting moving to Mojave just now. Is anyone using Aperture on Mojave?

Over on PhotoJoseph, Stevewayne23 wrote:

"I haven’t been able to find a suitable replacement for Aperture’s DAM, so am still using the program with several plug-ins (Luminar, Photoshop, Aurora, etc.). The catalog is on an external hard drive that I switch between an iMac and 15-inch MacBook and I installed Mojave on my iMac and found that Aperture does not work well with it at all. My photos (almost 70,000 now) load fine but everything is extremely slow so I’m using it exclusively on my MacBook Pro with High Sierra and it still works fine. I would be interested in hearing how others using Aperture with Mojave are faring."

This does rather put me off. I was hoping to move to Mojave as the last version that will support 32-bit software; the drivers for my older Plustek scanner are 32-bit, and Plustek don't seem to be interested in updating them. So if I do go beyond Mojave it'll cost me a couple of hundred for a new scanner... :( From that point of view it looked like the best approach might be to go to Mojave and stick there... but not if Aperture doesn't run well!

And no, I'm not moving to Lightroom. Currently evaluating Luminar 3 with libraries; definitely not good enough yet to take over, though it does show potential. C1 Pro definitely on the cards, but in either case it'll need to be a slow, gradual transition.

So, to repeat, any experiences here of using Aperture on 10.14 Mojave? Thanks
 
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Yes, I use it on Mojave and on High Sierra.
However, I seem to remember it disappearing when I did one of the OS upgrades, but all I did was to reinstall it from the App Store and it works absolutely fine.
FWIW, I don't think there's anything better for viewing images - I never load anything onto the Mac but Aperture stores them as a 'referenced' file so I can view them, and if I want to edit I'll just open the file from the external hard drive into Photoshop (I don't use Aperture for editing)
Hope this helps?
 
I'm on high Sierra and use Aperature - I always have done and will continue to do so until I move to C1. The library feature of Aperture is unparalleled and as I know the software I have no desire to learn something new until I absolutely have to.

You can export your RAWs and renditions (TIFFS) from Aperature into folders anyway. I use the Library and back this up to an external drive but also make a separate back up where I export originals and a TIFF file into "folders" in case the whole aperture thing goes tits up
 
Yes, I use it on Mojave and on High Sierra.
However, I seem to remember it disappearing when I did one of the OS upgrades, but all I did was to reinstall it from the App Store and it works absolutely fine.
FWIW, I don't think there's anything better for viewing images - I never load anything onto the Mac but Aperture stores them as a 'referenced' file so I can view them, and if I want to edit I'll just open the file from the external hard drive into Photoshop (I don't use Aperture for editing)
Hope this helps?

Thanks Maria. Good to know it's working on Mojave. Have you tried printing anything from there?

I was astounded when I saw how the local members of my U3A camera group view images for display, painfully opening each one in PS. Aperture is so much better for that job, with the full screen display.
 
Thanks Maria. Good to know it's working on Mojave. Have you tried printing anything from there?

I was astounded when I saw how the local members of my U3A camera group view images for display, painfully opening each one in PS. Aperture is so much better for that job, with the full screen display.

In terms of actual editing PS has Aperture beat but in Many ways Aperture is a better tool than LR. I've used both and was not enamoured with LR. Where LR wins is the lens profiling, fake grads and the shadow recovery is a little cleaner but really nothing in it. Aperture does it all for a landscaper who works with single exposures and grad filters. No delay in previews loading up, no crap with side car files, in many ways it's the ultimate raw convertor/DAM suite.
 
I'm on high Sierra and use Aperature - I always have done and will continue to do so until I move to C1. The library feature of Aperture is unparalleled and as I know the software I have no desire to learn something new until I absolutely have to.

You can export your RAWs and renditions (TIFFS) from Aperature into folders anyway. I use the Library and back this up to an external drive but also make a separate back up where I export originals and a TIFF file into "folders" in case the whole aperture thing goes tits up

I'm on High Sierra too. I agree about the merits of the DAM, and also about sticking with something when you know it (or the relevant bits of it) backwards.

However unlike you I have mostly managed files. There's a fairly complex structure of Aperture folders and albums that works for me. I think I probably should be exporting logical subsets of the structure onto external hard drives; what tends to dissuade me (apart from natural laziness :( ) is that when I revisit older images I often find I am re-processing them. Much better to do that from the original JPEG (*) than the PP'd one. Contemplating exporting the original file as well as the PP'd one, but then that's double the disk space.

* I only have one digital camera, a Fuji X10, and the Mac doesn't recognise its raws, so I gave up using them. Mostly I use film; most scanners will only give you JPEGs or 8-bit TIFFs which are much bigger. I did a test with multiple edit/save cycles on a file as JPEG and 8-bit TIFF, and there was no noticeable difference after 10 cycles, so stuck with the much smaller JPEGs. 16-bit TIFFs might be noticeably better, but at even greater storage cost.
 
In terms of actual editing PS has Aperture beat but in Many ways Aperture is a better tool than LR. I've used both and was not enamoured with LR. Where LR wins is the lens profiling, fake grads and the shadow recovery is a little cleaner but really nothing in it. Aperture does it all for a landscaper who works with single exposures and grad filters. No delay in previews loading up, no crap with side car files, in many ways it's the ultimate raw convertor/DAM suite.

Yeah, doubly and trebly p1ssed at Apple for stopping it, a business choice which I really don't understand for a $trillion company. But at least it's kept working.

Anyway, this thread has given me a little encouragement to move to Mojave. Anyone know if it is possible to back out to High Sierra if I have problems?
 
I'm on High Sierra too. I agree about the merits of the DAM, and also about sticking with something when you know it (or the relevant bits of it) backwards.

However unlike you I have mostly managed files. There's a fairly complex structure of Aperture folders and albums that works for me. I think I probably should be exporting logical subsets of the structure onto external hard drives; what tends to dissuade me (apart from natural laziness :( ) is that when I revisit older images I often find I am re-processing them. Much better to do that from the original JPEG (*) than the PP'd one. Contemplating exporting the original file as well as the PP'd one, but then that's double the disk space.

* I only have one digital camera, a Fuji X10, and the Mac doesn't recognise its raws, so I gave up using them. Mostly I use film; most scanners will only give you JPEGs or 8-bit TIFFs which are much bigger. I did a test with multiple edit/save cycles on a file as JPEG and 8-bit TIFF, and there was no noticeable difference after 10 cycles, so stuck with the much smaller JPEGs. 16-bit TIFFs might be noticeably better, but at even greater storage cost.

Storage is cheap. You can create “versions” in aperture keeping the original rendition then creating others as taste evolves. Export the versions as 16 bit TIFFs and one raw to a back up drive and all sorted.
 
Yeah, doubly and trebly p1ssed at Apple for stopping it, a business choice which I really don't understand for a $trillion company. But at least it's kept working.

Anyway, this thread has given me a little encouragement to move to Mojave. Anyone know if it is possible to back out to High Sierra if I have problems?
Don’t know about ‘backing out’ but you can install Sierra (or whatever version) on a different partition/drive or a a virtual machine, or wipe Mojave and reinstall on your main partition. Earlier versions of Mac OS X remain available in the App Store.
 
oh how I cried the night that aperture died , so short sighted of apple to let it drop sadly missed
 
I'm running the latest beta version of Mojave 10.14.3 and aperture works just fine.

It was a poor decision by Apple not to support or update aperture by far my preferred way of organising and editing my photos.
 
On Mohave and using Aperture, but trying to move away from it, in preparation for when it finally bites the dust.

Apple have kept on up keeping their professional video editor and their sound one. I cannot fathom why they dropped their photo one, Aperture. It makes no sense whatsoever.
 
Vault inside aperture is a fantastic tool for backing up your library

I do use the Vault, but I assume it's a packaged file structure containing original files and coded instructions to enable Aperture to create the final versions of those files. As such, I assume it's not a lot of use if Aperture does stop working for some reason. But I'd be happy to be proved wrong!
 
I do use the Vault, but I assume it's a packaged file structure containing original files and coded instructions to enable Aperture to create the final versions of those files. As such, I assume it's not a lot of use if Aperture does stop working for some reason. But I'd be happy to be proved wrong!

It does work this way sadly - which is why I have started to export versions manually to another back up drive. Export your projects as "folders" and what I've done is export originals set as folders named as the project name, then 16bit TIFFs as the same in a separate renditions folder. I still use the vault system too - but I am acutely aware Aperture 3 hasn't been supported for quite some time so doing this as well.
 
It does work this way sadly - which is why I have started to export versions manually to another back up drive. Export your projects as "folders" and what I've done is export originals set as folders named as the project name, then 16bit TIFFs as the same in a separate renditions folder. I still use the vault system too - but I am acutely aware Aperture 3 hasn't been supported for quite some time so doing this as well.
That sounds like the right approach, Steve. Do you have to do an export for each project, or can you select a bunch of projects and have the folder structure set up automagically?

(Thinking... if the first answer is "no". there just might be a way to do something like it in... Applescript?)
 
That sounds like the right approach, Steve. Do you have to do an export for each project, or can you select a bunch of projects and have the folder structure set up automagically?

(Thinking... if the first answer is "no". there just might be a way to do something like it in... Applescript?)

I do an export for each project. RAWs then folders by project name in one RAW folder then 16 bit TIFF with the export colour space set to adobe 1998 in renditions folder with project sub folders.
 
This thread isn't really about mass Aperture export, but... I found an article from 2015 with instructions, but they just didn't work (couldn't mass select files, etc). Then I found a reference to Aperture Exporter, which costs CAD$19.99, and appears to preserve existing project structure and other metadata, either with originals, or adjustments applied. Looks interesting!
 
Thanks Maria. Good to know it's working on Mojave. Have you tried printing anything from there?

I was astounded when I saw how the local members of my U3A camera group view images for display, painfully opening each one in PS. Aperture is so much better for that job, with the full screen display.

I only ever print from PS, Aperture is my catalogue and viewer
 
I find Apple photos great for Organization and viewing,convert and edit rows in LR then send to photos,I used to use aperture,is there anything in the dam that improves on AP?
 
I find Apple photos great for Organization and viewing,convert and edit rows in LR then send to photos,I used to use aperture,is there anything in the dam that improves on AP?

Not quite sure what you mean, but I use ratings a LOT, they're an integral part of my workflow, so Apple Photos doesn't cut it for me. Reasonable place to dump phone photos though.

I'm planning to load each set of film images into Luminar 3 as well as Aperture, though to date I'm not finding it intuitive. I know, I've been working with Aperture for 5+ years and Luminar for 5+ minutes, it's not fair! ETA ... But, little things like if I adjust the level (horizontal/vertical) of an image, it doesn't automatically crop it back to a rectangle, I have to do that as a separate edit. Plus, I'v read alarming things about how file sizes creep up holding the (poorly encoded?) non-destructive edits. Maybe it'll get better... it's certainly cheap enough for me!
 
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So, for various reasons I was persuaded to upgrade to Mojave, and Aperture is still working fine...

... except this evening for the first time since the upgrade I tried to upload an image to flickr via the inbuilt button, and it refused! Now I don't know if this is a side-effect of the Mojave upgrade or the flickr authentication changes, except I'm very confident I've uploaded some stuff to flickr via the button since going through the authentication bit. That doesn't mean the flickr hasn't made other changes there, of course (sorry for the double negative).

It wouldn't upload, and it won't allow me to setup the connecion again. Everything I've tried just... doesn't work!

Has anyone else recently found the flickr upload button not working?
 
I have had a lot of difficulty using Aperture, which I've used since day 1, in Mojave. It won't recognise PSD files any more, and since most of my out of Aperture processing is in PS, this has been something of a nuisance. It hasn't been able to upload to Zenfolio for some time now and though I don't use FB that much hasn't uploaded to there for about three years. It's beginning to break down and I'm that hacked off with Apple about it I'm thinking of going to the dark side, not that they give a monkeys.
 
I’m a few months into my Capture One odyssey and it is going well, I’ve got over the muscle memory of things I used to do in Aperture that are different in Capture One. I’ve set up a Favourites tab for the adjustments that I use most frequently. The exporting is complex and easy to mess up, but has so many options. One big thing that I find quite annoying is that the application displays the jpg and RAW from an image as two separate files. So if I wish to rate images, or put them somewhere else, I have to select both. Aperture allows you to treat them effectively as two versions of the same photo, and switch between them.

Once I’m fully integrated I shall be ready to worry for three years about switching to another application when Capture
One gets left behind...
 
Aperture won’t run in future versions of MacOS:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209594

There is advice in that post on how to migrate your Aperture Library to Photos, or to Lightroom Classic, but not to Luminar or Capture One Pro. I guess ApertureExporter would be helpful, though I have not yet tried using it. I believe there is an Aperture importer tool in Capture One; has anyone any experience with this?
I’ve been putting some metadata in filenames, eg film stock, film camera used etc, so I’m currently undertaking the rather massive task of transferring this metadata to keywords. (I’ll try doing the same for albums.) However, in the process I’ve had warnings that some files are not available at full resolution. I’m presuming these might be from my experiments with referenced files, rather than those in the Aperture Library (the vast majority). Can anyone confirm this? Is there a way to get referenced files into the Aperture Library (or even find out which projects are referenced)?

Chris
 
Yes, I'm in full-on tantrum mode right now!

Yep. Luckily I’ve exported the RAWs into folders the same way as I run projects and exported 16 bitt tifs of the final renditions into folders organised the same way.

I’ll buy capture one and just edit new stuff in that and if I want to re render prior RAWs I’ll import into c1.

I’m tempted to migrate the aperture library to photos in the short term also just to preserve the adjustments made.

This has been coming for a long time - I did a huge reprocessing run getting all my images in order over the winter - so I could export final renditions and RAWs.

I might go back to a PC - one of the big draws to getting a MAC was aperture and how well it intergrated into the OS. Photos won’t quite give me what I need in terms of DAM plus RAW manipulation. C1 it is - I’ve tried LR and just don’t get on with it
 
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I am attempting to do some printing with Aperture for the first time since upgrading to Mojave. Something has definitely changed! It is defaulting to "Printer managed", and when I try and select something else it just produces a list of unfamiliar looking names (presumable colour profile names). Has anyone else (a) had this behaviour or (b) managed to print using Aperture?

I appreciate it's difficult to find common ground here as we're at the intersection of the application, the OS and the printer driver. My printer is a consumer Canon MG5250 which has given me surprisingly good A4 results over the past 5 years or so!
 
I am attempting to do some printing with Aperture for the first time since upgrading to Mojave. Something has definitely changed! It is defaulting to "Printer managed", and when I try and select something else it just produces a list of unfamiliar looking names (presumable colour profile names). Has anyone else (a) had this behaviour or (b) managed to print using Aperture?

I appreciate it's difficult to find common ground here as we're at the intersection of the application, the OS and the printer driver. My printer is a consumer Canon MG5250 which has given me surprisingly good A4 results over the past 5 years or so!

I think maybe all that's happened is that the previous settings for printing (which usually stick around from session to session, over months and years) somehow got lost. Pleased to say I managed to remember roughly what the settings were, and have succeeded in making some prints.
 
I'm running the Catalina beta and the Aperture icon is greyed out and the program will not load.

View attachment 251109
Umm, I gave you a ‘like’ because we don’t have ‘thanks’ but it should be a :mad: really — not for you but for Apple.
 
I'm running the Catalina beta and the Aperture icon is greyed out and the program will not load.

View attachment 251109

Oh bother (in other words...)...

Not quite sure what you mean, but I use ratings a LOT, they're an integral part of my workflow, so Apple Photos doesn't cut it for me. Reasonable place to dump phone photos though.

I'm planning to load each set of film images into Luminar 3 as well as Aperture, though to date I'm not finding it intuitive. I know, I've been working with Aperture for 5+ years and Luminar for 5+ minutes, it's not fair! ETA ... But, little things like if I adjust the level (horizontal/vertical) of an image, it doesn't automatically crop it back to a rectangle, I have to do that as a separate edit. Plus, I'v read alarming things about how file sizes creep up holding the (poorly encoded?) non-destructive edits. Maybe it'll get better... it's certainly cheap enough for me!

Luminar 3 has definitely not excited me, and I've increasingly found things I wanted to do and couldn't (printing seemed quite limited, for example; no support for multiple images, eg contact prints etc).

I'm trying to gird myself up to buy C1Pro (or at least try a free trial) but I'll need to do it when I can dedicate some time to really learning it. I have Affinity Photo but use it so rarely I have to find a video each time I want to do something! (Though I was quite proud yesterday when after watching an Adorama TV video on using Photoshop to make a triptych for FPOTY, I was able to translate it into doing the same approach on Affinity...)
 
When I started Aperture today (haven’t for some time) in MacOS Mojave I got the message “Aperture will not work in the next version of macOS”. Seems pretty clear to me ☹️.
 
Downloaded the C1Pro trial yesterday, and trying to come to grips with it. It's the Fujifilm version, since the only digital camera I have is a Fuji X10. On twitter C1 said it was fine to use the Fuji version if the only raws I have were Fuji, provided the other files are JPEG or TIFF, which my film scans are.

On first glance, 3 annoying things so far: can't see how to display the images in a project as a grid, rather than a film strip; it's apparently not possible to easily display all the images in a folder of projects (which I used a lot in Aperture, coupled with the ratings selector, eg to find all the 3-star images in 2019); and the level (not Levels) tool is crude in comparison to Aperture. I can see me producing a lot of very slightly crooked images... OK, this is just grumps from a different interface, I'm sure I'll get used to it.

On the plus side, C1Pro had no problem with the raws from my X10; Aperture could only deal with these if converted to DNG first. OTOH since there was no easy way to process the raws [in Aperture], I've stuck with the excellent JPEGs from the X10, and don't suppose I'm likely to change now, since all my main work is JPEG/TIFF based!

I've been watching quite a few videos, some from C1 and some from others. Advice on converting from Aperture does seem to be to have a go with the importer, which is supposed to handle a lot of the adjustments, except spot/clone maybe? If the later's true, it's a bit of a bummer for me, given the amount of dust on the scans from my 1970s Kodachrome slides! I guess for those exporting the current "finished" versions is the way to go, though I often find when I want to access one, that it needs a little bit of re-adjustment...

They do say if you're going to use the import tool, don't do it all at once, export sensible chunks as temporary Aperture libraries and import from there into temporary C1Pro catalogues, then when it works import from those temporary catalogues into the main catalogue. Oh, and also that it's better if the images in your Aperture library are referenced rather than managed. Almost all of mine are managed... :(
 
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Oh dear, this gets ever more complicated. My Aperture library on my MacBook Pro is 170 GB and I have only 112 GB free! I need to turn the Aperture library from nearly all managed images to all referenced images, and then import these into C1Pro. I don't want things on external drives since I move around a lot and want access to images wherever I am (though something I read suggested that C1Pro is actually rather clever at dealing with images that are offline).

If I relocate images from the Aperture library to be referenced images, does the Aperture library immediately decrease in size by a corresponding amount?

Also, if I have the original scans from which I imported (to become managed images) still on disk, is there a way for those original images to become the referenced images, or do I have to create another copy via the relocate process? Anyone know?

I guess those originals are obvious candidates to remove from the hard drive onto an external drive...

I'd also quite like to export all the edited versions from Aperture, although that can probably easily be done to an external drive.
 
I have to do my minor edits on a rather low-power laptop at the moment (macbook 12" from 2013) and I recently moved from Lightroom 6 to C1 Fuji, because Lightroom was getting ridiculously slow somehow. Given the limits of the device I have to say I'm quite fascinated by how much faster everything works in C1. I'll buy a bigger mac soon anyway so that might not be that important, but for now this was brought some fun back into shooting raw for me.

I realise this isn't a top priority for you and I'm not sure how the performance is compared to aperture. I'm thinking about actually buying a license though, because I feel that the "sessions" structure instead of one big catalogue would be vastly better for me, since my laptops never have enough space and I almost never edit or access old raws (but want to keep the ability), so it seems like the better way to archive things. With lightroom you had to use multiple catalogues to do this

Edit: The macbook is from 2016 of course, they didn't exist in 2013 ;-) Still weak though.
 
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I have to do my minor edits on a rather low-power laptop at the moment (macbook 12" from 2013) and I recently moved from Lightroom 6 to C1 Fuji, because Lightroom was getting ridiculously slow somehow. Given the limits of the device I have to say I'm quite fascinated by how much faster everything works in C1. I'll buy a bigger mac soon anyway so that might not be that important, but for now this was brought some fun back into shooting raw for me.

I realise this isn't a top priority for you and I'm not sure how the performance is compared to aperture. I'm thinking about actually buying a license though, because I feel that the "sessions" structure instead of one big catalogue would be vastly better for me, since my laptops never have enough space and I almost never edit or access old raws (but want to keep the ability), so it seems like the better way to archive things. With lightroom you had to use multiple catalogues to do this

Interesting! I've not had performance problems with Aperture, and it's too early to say with Capture One Pro. I don't think sessions are for me, as an amateur I don't have the same sort of workflow, and my interest in my images extends right back to the 1960s!

I'm guessing you've installed C1 Fuji Express, from what you've said. At the moment C1Pro Fuji is £109, about half price, but I think this offer ends before the end of August (although I also saw hints that it had been extended in the past, so who knows). I'm still on the free trial, but I've made a diary note to make a decision before the end of the month.
 
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