Import Complete

The execution of the import process completed late yesterday after about 72 hours of processing. Now comes the clean up and alignment.

A comparison of the counts looks good, although there are some minor discrepancies they are tolerable. Of the 48,795 photographs that were in the Aperture Library, 176 of them are not accounted for.  However, none of the photographs I really care about are missing.   

Some initial observations:

• It is nice to be able to see my full portfolio in one shot.
• Managed Photographs in Aperture were (properly) migrated as Referenced in Lightroom.  They were stored in a subdirectory by day (i.e., YYYY/MMM/YYYY-MM-DD).  This is different from my current directory structure that is YYYY/MM.  I’ll need to tidy this up.  
• The migration process spit out a log listing photographs that were not transferred (I mentioned this in a previous post.)  I’ve gone through this log and for the most part the errors relate to files that I had previously deleted in Lightroom because they were duplicates.  The delete had not been reported to Aperture so its catalogue was inconsistent.
• The project structure of Aperture has been maintained although a subfolder has been added to each project folder named Project Photos.  I’m not sure of the purpose, although in the end I will want to move these photos into the existing Lightroom structure so I don’t see the inclusion of a subfolder as material.
• The events structure of Aperture has been maintained; no additional subfolders here. These folders should be relatively straight forward to move into the Lightroom structure, although there are 863 of them.
• Locations have been properly migrated.
• Keywords have been carried over without being merged with those pre-existing in Lightroom, which I think I prefer, albeit some additional work.  All keywords carried over from Aperture were stored under Lightroom’s default Keyword folder.  
• Most important, the Faces from Aperture (i.e., people’s names) have been carried over. It’s a lot of work to manually plough through thousands of pictures and identify the people in them.  Several years ago I scanned nearly two hundred family pictures dating back to the late 1800’s.  I spent a lot of time naming each person and approximating dates, where they were not available.  I did not relish having to manually re-enter this information.  

While there are some more days to be spent merging keywords and collections, the heavy lifting is done.