We had a request about our Lightroom course from an apple aperture user left high and dry by Aperture no longer being supported.
Having done a bit of research it seems a good idea to let you all know our conclusions since this will be a common problem for photographers. Apple announced it was not going to update aperture software in favour of a new cloud based offering due to commence next year. (so much for rewarding loyalty – the last update was November 2013).
Migrating from Aperture to Lightroom
The migration of your Aperture catalogs to Lightrooom is not easy because they are storing pointers to catalogs as well as storing all sorts of information about how the file has been edited. If you are more familiar with Photoshop then think of it as like storing psd files along with loads of layers and history included.
If you export completed files from Aperture then you can import them into Lightroom but if you want the editing structure and the ability to go back to earlier snapshots then you have problems.
Looking around the net is seems that there is not a perfect answer to this problem yet. Adobe say they are developing an import add-on to do the transfer properly and we think it may be best to wait for that. In the meantime you can work on the Aperture images which you already have and start with Lightroom on your new photos.
You can get a 30 day free download from Adobe to try it out.
Adobe Lightroom 30 day trial
If you can’t wait or want to experiment, here is a link to beta software which may be able to do part of the job – it says it keeps your Aperture libraries intact so it appears safe to try it out but please note that we haven’t tried it ourselves and this is entirely at your own risk.
You can also let us know if it worked for you!