Following preparation, the next step in moving my old photos from iView to Aperture is importing. There are two things to import: the images and the metadata.

Import Images
At the end of this process my Aperture library will contain managed images. But initially I import all of them by reference into the projects I prepared. The reason for this will become clear. I import entire folder hierarchies at once by using File > Import > Folders Into A Project. This puts all of the images from the folder hierarchy into a project and creates a hierarchy of brown folders and albums that matches the folder organization. In this way I still have my old hierarchy represented but can archive it without manual blue folder work and lots of separate imports. Of course I can throw away the albums if I wish: I may not want to have any remnants of my old folder structure remain in Aperture.

When importing I use a rename setting called Version Dash Date. That takes the version name and adds the image date. I leave the images in their current location. So on the import dialog, the settings look like this:

I don't have to wait for the imports to complete. Aperture will queue imports and automatically go through all of the ones I have set up:

Then when my imports are all complete, I wait for all the thumbnails to build -- just to be sure nothing odd happens -- and check the projects over to make sure they look right.

All of the images so for imported have been referenced, but the next step changes that. For each project in the blue folder I created (called iView) I consolidate the masters with the Move option selected. File > Consolidate Masters for Project brings up this dialog that confirms my selection:

This step moves the referenced masters into my Aperture library, so leaving the original folders empty. But are they empty? If they are not then there has been a problem and I need to go sort it out. Possible reasons for the folders not being empty include bad image files, images files in formats that Aperture will not import, text and other foreign files, and permissions problems.

Any easy way to do this check is to display the top-level folder in list view in the Finder, select everything with command A, and then press option command right-arrow. That opens all the folders recursively and shows their contents. Close them all up again with option command left-arrow.

I deal with anything that has not been consolidated, and get all the remaining images into the library or trash them if they are corrupt.

Once consolidated, I mark all the images with a new keyword notreviewed using the keyword HUD. I'm not sure I will need it, but this is the last opportunity to have a way of automatically tying together all of the images I have removed from my old folder structure.

Import Metadata
Now I break out Annoture. The version I am using is 1.0.2. Annoture processes all of the metadata for the images in a project by scanning the iView catalog for the file names of those images, retrieving the metadata, and adding it to the Aperture database.

Here are the preferences I use for Annoture:

By ignoring file extensions I can have Annoture copy metadata from old files that had no extension but were corrected to have an extension before they were added to Aperture. Comparing capture dates allows images in the iView catalog that have the same name to be distinguished. Without that metadata from the first image found rather than the correct image will be transferred.

I set up the main window like this:

Each time I run Annoture I select the appropriate project in the pop-up. I have to make sure that all of my projects have different names, because it is not possible to distinguish identically-named projects here.

Important: Annoture transfers metadata for each image in the selected Aperture project by examining the current selection displayed by iView. It is important to know this, because if I have a subset of my thumbnails displayed in iView when I run Annoture two things will happen: 1) it will run faster because it has fewer images to scan, and 2) there will be some images that do not have their metadata transferred.

I can use this behavior to my advantage. Since my old images are organized into folders by year or month, I set up the Aperture projects that way. By filtering the iView display by using the Catalog Folder pane:

I can limit the number of images that Annoture has to search and speed it up dramatically. Instead of searching 10,000 images, iView will only search a few hundred. That drops the processing time from 15 seconds per image down to less than one.

Since I tagged all of the images in my iView catalog with iviewimport, any of the imported images in my Aperture that were not successfully processed by Annoture lack the iviewimport keyword. So after copying the metadata for each project I run a filter that looks for all images without iviewimport in the IPTC keyword field:

Now I can examine those images and figure out why they could not be found in the iView catalog. The usual reason is that the image was never put into the iView catalog and hence has no metadata. In other cases the iView thumbnail was incorrect and somehow had become attached to a different image.

Import is now done. Next is the final step: reorganization.

Tags: Aperture, iView, Importing, Keywords, Library