My first post-migration (from Aperture to Lightroom) activity has been to clean up the tags. This included consolidating duplicates, restructuring, and other things. The duplication occurred for at least two reasons I can determine: [1] different naming conventions [2] changes in the tagging hierarchy. I don’t see either of these s being a failure of the migration tool, and I did see cases where tags were consolidated.
Different naming conventions reflect both an evolution of tag use over time (remember that the Aperture Library, which is actually evolved from an earlier iPhoto Library, was started some 8 years ago) and a decision to tag people last name, first name in Lightroom rather then the reverse.
The second source of duplication resulted from an evolution in the tag hierarchy itself. Over time the hierarchy has evolved to provide further detail. For example, I now break out the tag animal into specific beasts. I didn’t do this initially because there weren’t enough photographs of each to justify separation.
As far as people tagging goes, I have broken them into three groups: friends (169 entries), family (60 entries) and notables (10 entries). Aperture didn’t have these distinctions. Aperture also included a tag unnamed Face, which is applied when a face is detected but a name is not attributed. There are 5695 entries here. This will offer something to consume the hours I now have available to me.
One of the migration options was to locate original files and a JPEG-rendition that includes all adjustments into the same stack. This eases finding the two and comparing them. As well as being put into the same stack, each photograph was tagged with a stack number (e.g., Aperture Stack 1, Aperture Stack 2, … Aperture Stack 762). I’m not quite sure at this point what to do with these, so I’ll keep them.
There are a number of tags that capture custom fields, that is fields not present in Lightroom or that could not be transferred over. In my case there are just a few of these for Flickr ID and Flickr URL.
The next step is to review the collections, and figure out how they should be merged into the structure I have in Lightroom.
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