I have been busy moving all my old photos that were cataloged with iView into Aperture. It has taken a while to work through all the issues and get the workflow straight, but the result is exactly what I wanted: all the images with their metadata transferred. To transfer the metadata I used Annoture, Adam Tow's utility. Special thanks go to Adam for modifying his utility to work around some of the problems I found with my old image files.

Since there is a lot of detail to this process I am presenting what I found as three separate articles covering the three distinct steps needed: preparation, importing, and clean up. This article covers preparation. There are three things that need preparation: the images, the iView catalog, and Aperture.

Prepare Images and Folders

The first step in preparation is to back up my old images. I use spare space on a Firewire drive for this. Backing everything up leaves me an escape route in case I run into a bug or problem I cannot fix, or simply mess everything up by making an error.

Next I make sure that all the images and folders are not write-protected. Write-protected images and folders will cause problems later when I want to remove them. By selecting the top-level folder and hitting command-I I can check the permissions:

That needs fixing. I click the pop-up, change it to Read and Write and then click the disclosure triangle to see the details:

Clicking on Apply to enclosed items will propagate the changes down to all the folders and files.

Importing files that have no extension into Aperture can cause problems, so the next exercise is to make sure every file has one. To do that I go through each folder in turn in list view, sorting by type, and dragging anything that either has no extension or a JPG extension to a folder on the desktop. Then I run this Automator action on that folder:

This adds .jpg to anything that does not already have it. Then I drag the renamed images back to the folder they came from. This breaks the link between iView and the renamed images, but that is OK. Annoture can be set up to deal with that.

Then I look for files with names containing forward slash (/) characters. These will cause problems with metadata transfer later on, so I rename them in iView (so that iView knows the new name -- Annoture will not help me here).

Finally I remove all foreign files from the folders I am going to import images from: sounds files, movies, text files, anything that might confuse or upset the process.

Prepare the iView Catalog

I will be using Annoture to move metadata from iView to Aperture. It works well, but it is not magic. There are some things it cannot do, and some things that it can do will make for extra work in Aperture that I can reduce by doing some of the work in iView.

The basic philosophy is to change all the metadata types that could have multiple entries for one image into multiple keywords and then move that metadata into Aperture.

First I make a back up my iView catalog. I can now fritz with the metadata as much as I like before moving it over to Aperture.

Then I add a new keyword iviewimport, select all the images in my iView catalog, and apply that keyword to them. This step will let me be assured that metadata for all images has been transferred. If any image in Aperture that came from my old images does not have the iviewimport keyword, then Annoture did not move the metadata for some reason (it could be missing from my iView catalog for instance).

In iVew I have all my people listed under the People category. In Aperture I use keywords. So the next step is to create a keyword for each person in iView. The keywords I create are all lower-case: bob, not Bob. I do this so that the new keywords will not get confused with the existing keywords in Aperture. I will convert all the bob keywords to Bob keywords later. To apply the new keywords, I select that person in the People list, select all of the images that include that person, and drag them to the new keyword.

Then I rename all my iView keywords so that they start with a lower-case letter. The reason for this is that I have several keywords in Aperture that are the same except for their hierarchy. I have Content > Water and also Blog > Water. Another more realistic example would be Color > Orange and Fruit > Orange. When the metadata is transferred from iView to Aperture, Aperture makes a random choice between the available keywords if there is more than one match. So anything tagged with Water in iView will end up either as Content > Water or Blog > Water and have to be sorted out manually. But if I change all the Water keywords to water in iView this will not occur and everything will get the naked water keyword.

Lastly I convert all my labels to keywords. Because hitting number keys is so convenient, I, like a lot of people, have used the labels for rating images instead of the Rating category. But since ratings don't transfer in Annoture I need to convert these to keywords and then deal with them in Aperture. It's the same system as for people. This time the keywords I create are onestar, twostars etc., all lower-case again.

Prepare my Aperture Library

First I make a back up of my Aperture library. A simple copy will work.

Next I create new projects. I will work on one chunk of images at a time by creating projects in Aperture and filling each with images from my old folder hierarchy. A project will typically be a year or a month of images, depending on how many photos I was taking at the time. For some images, such as scans of old photos, I will have a different structure. I put all of those new, empty, projects into a hierarchy of blue folders with one at the top called iView.

I don't want my existing Aperture keywords to be modified, so I make sure the keyword HUD is locked. That is done by clicking the small lock on the keyword HUD (shift H).

This ensures that the keywords that come in with the imports are put into the Import Keywords part of the keyword HUD.

That's all the preparation done. Next is importing.

Tags: iView, Aperture, Workflow