Aperture - Chronicle of a death foretold. Need help with C1
Ever since Apple decided to no longer support Aperture, I have played with various software and quickly fell in love with Capture One. The RAW processing is superb and I have re-processed photos that had previously been processed by Aperture. I now find the Aperture pictures dull whilst the one processed by Capture One are simply « brilliant ».
But, I found Capture One’s DAM confusing, so I have so far kept using Aperture for its DAM capabilities — and imported Capture One processed photos into it.
This morning I decided to « test » Capture One’s DAM by opening a new Catalogue and importing an Aperture Library that contains approximately 10,000 RAW REFERENCED shots, broken down into approximately 6 Folders and 50 smart albums. I first converted the smart albums into folders by highlighting the imbedded photos and creating an « Album » and placing them in their hierarchical place under the appropriate Folder. I then deleted the smart albums. So my Aperture Library looked OK.
A note on how the pictures are referenced: When I import my photos from the camera, I first open a folder on an external hard drive and give it a generic name, for example « 2015-10 France ». I then open subfolders, one per day, say « 2015-10-25 Paris day 1 ," « 2015-10-26 Paris day 2 ». I then drop into each designated folder the RAW file that my camera has automatically generated for each day; so, for day 2 of the trip, the RAW files are located in
2015-10 France/2015-10-26 Paris day 2/Camera File Number/RAW files.
I have about 70 such RAW files in this test.
In Aperture, I simply import the file by reference and « 2015-10-26 Paris day 2 » appears as a Project under the appropriate Folder I will have previously opened in Aperture entitled, say France (I do this every evening when on a trip).
This being said, this morning I opened a new catalogue in Capture One and imported the Aperture Library…
Once done, I was at a loss…
In my USER COLLECTION, I see all my files, sub files and sub-sub files, with the proper names. But I have but a couple of dozen of frames imported…
In the FOLDERS section, I have the 70 RAW files and all the 10,000 pictures appear… And of course, I can’t move the pictures in the FOLDERS Files back into their proper destination in the USER COLLECTION folders.
A total mess…
No way will I try to import my 250,000 frames in my MASTER APERTURE LIBRARY until I understand what is going on. Anyone have a clue ?
But, I found Capture One’s DAM confusing, so I have so far kept using Aperture for its DAM capabilities — and imported Capture One processed photos into it.
This morning I decided to « test » Capture One’s DAM by opening a new Catalogue and importing an Aperture Library that contains approximately 10,000 RAW REFERENCED shots, broken down into approximately 6 Folders and 50 smart albums. I first converted the smart albums into folders by highlighting the imbedded photos and creating an « Album » and placing them in their hierarchical place under the appropriate Folder. I then deleted the smart albums. So my Aperture Library looked OK.
A note on how the pictures are referenced: When I import my photos from the camera, I first open a folder on an external hard drive and give it a generic name, for example « 2015-10 France ». I then open subfolders, one per day, say « 2015-10-25 Paris day 1 ," « 2015-10-26 Paris day 2 ». I then drop into each designated folder the RAW file that my camera has automatically generated for each day; so, for day 2 of the trip, the RAW files are located in
2015-10 France/2015-10-26 Paris day 2/Camera File Number/RAW files.
I have about 70 such RAW files in this test.
In Aperture, I simply import the file by reference and « 2015-10-26 Paris day 2 » appears as a Project under the appropriate Folder I will have previously opened in Aperture entitled, say France (I do this every evening when on a trip).
This being said, this morning I opened a new catalogue in Capture One and imported the Aperture Library…
Once done, I was at a loss…
In my USER COLLECTION, I see all my files, sub files and sub-sub files, with the proper names. But I have but a couple of dozen of frames imported…
In the FOLDERS section, I have the 70 RAW files and all the 10,000 pictures appear… And of course, I can’t move the pictures in the FOLDERS Files back into their proper destination in the USER COLLECTION folders.
A total mess…
No way will I try to import my 250,000 frames in my MASTER APERTURE LIBRARY until I understand what is going on. Anyone have a clue ?
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Marc so am I correct that the main problem you referring to it that after import from aperture you got correct folder structure on file system. And Albums or project inside C1 which are not properly populated.
My basic quess why it messed up is because files are referenced by Aperture not been stored inside aperture catalog.
Did you checked this tutorial?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IylO2Hxegkg0 -
Marc
I'm another Aperture refugee who loves Capture One. The main reason I chose it over the other obvious and not so obvious candidates was because of how well it transferred the Aperture library. (BTW, I take it that your Aperture is set up as a managed library).
I have posted on this a few times here, but in brief I used an app called Aperture Exporter (AE); the first step was to create a new Aperture library from similar Albums - a key step as you have to keep the export-import sizes reasonably small. As each new "handy bite size chunks" library was created I used AE to export the files - these go into a "Top level album" folder that AE creates. I then identified this folder as the Catalog in Capture One and set up a User collection with Groups and Albums that replicated the Aperture library, and dragged the output from each converted mini Aperture library into the appropriate place. AE claims to handle a wide range of file types and certainly did so for my RAW (NEF), jpeg, tiff and PSD files.
I am sure there are several other ways to do it, but this way worked for me. The 2 essentials were using AE and creating/exporting/importing in not too large chunks. AE warns you about that on their web site and I had a miserable time with a trial of Capture One 7 when trying to move the lot at once. I gave up and explored some other options, including doing what you did, keeping Aperture as the DAM and calling something else as an external editor, but when CO 8 Pro was released gave it a try (using the above process). Delighted that I did.
As always, the caution that "YMMV" applies.0 -
Thank you both for your responses.
My understanding is that Capture One is fully capable - as is Aperture - to handle referenced files. And the Capture One Tutorial video clearly lets one assume this. So that should not be the issue. As a matter of fact, I have done exactly what is recommended in the video.
Regarding our fellow "refugee" from Aperture, I find the solution terribly cumbersome - and it implies that I would have to break down the 10,000 frame test I did into smaller bits. If I were to cut it, say, in four, I would have in fact to handle something like 15 different imports to handle my 250,000 frame aperture library.
I did another test, this time importing my shots into Apple's Photos. It worked pretty well and I have my DAM structure the way I want it.
So, to conclude, until Capture One comes out with a solution, I shall - FOR DAM PURPOSES ONLY - continue to use Aperture and start using Photos. I'll use Capture One for all RAW processing and export JPGS into Apple's software systems...
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Marc
Yes, "cumbersome" is not an unreasonable word to use. It took me about half a day all up to complete - that's the bad news. However, it worked flawlessly - that's the good news. To me, the good news comfortably outweighed the bad.
In round figures, I transferred 5,000 images into 12 Groups and 900 folders. I did cheat a little and left images that had not been accessed in the last 18 months (or were not "must keeps") in Aperture - took advantage of this just yesterday!
I did/do not have a referenced Aperture library so can't comment on how C1 would deal with that, only that the end product of moving the managed library was more than worth the relatively small effort.0 -
I was able, a few minutes ago, to "copy" pictures in the FOLDERS section into folders in my USERS COLLECTION and rank these alphabetically - that is a great step forward. HOWEVER, my FOLDER section names are camera designated numbers as opposed to names... Now I have to figure out what numbers correspond to what geographical names ! AGHHH
Also, I worked a little more on Apples Photos; its a mess as well as the hierarchy I had in Aperture doesn't correspond (yesterday at first glance I thought it did).
Well, as they say back home Trick or Treat !!! Its Halloween after all...
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Rather than forcing my Aperture workflow into C1, I took more than a month to get familiar with C1 and find a workflow in C1 that worked for me. Then I slowly started moving and converting old Aperture libraries over to C1. Since the workflow and structure is slightly different now, I manually have to update old projects. While that is extra work, I see it positive as in the end I feel that I have a better organized and cleaned up catalog. There are a few Aperture features that I am missing (named color tags, custom ITPC fields, reorganize referenced files,...) but I can live with that. Biggest concern right now is performance. With the same catalog sizes Aperture already wasn't really fast but C1 is sometimes really slow. 0 -
A big problem for me is deleting images from the disk. Aperture always made sense to me and removing from the library and deleting from the disk always "just worked."
How are you guys deleting an image you're reviewing in a collection, from the disk?0 -
Harald;
By double ckicking on it I ask to delete it; a box oppens and then asks me to confirm and its done..
The problem I have is that this can only be done one at a time...0 -
Hi Marc
I imported my Aperture Library of 17000 referenced images into C1 about 4 months ago.
I did it in about 4 groups of about 4000 images each - each group took about 2 hours - I found that during the last hour of a big import C1 does not respond to keystrokes, but is important not to stop it. It will eventually wake up and provide a message indicating that the import is complete.
If C1 crashes during an import, or you decide to kill it while it is importing, then some of the images are not imported. It is not easy to find the not-imported images.
As simple and important check after the import is to select "all images" in your catalog, and note how many images you have imported - this should of course be the same as the number of images in your Aperture a catalog.
Also check that your keywords were imported correctly. Importing hierarchical keywords requires special preparation.
There is also a C1 log which should be checked as this may indicate certain images which C1 rejects.
My guess is that if your Aperture Albums and projects are not present in your user collections, then the images in these albums and folders were not imported. I believe that what you are doing by dragging the images from your folders to your User Collections is importing them manually into C1.
If you are interested, somewhere in my posting history about 3 months ago I published ny recipe for importing a large Aperture Library into C1.0
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