Background

I needed some photos from an old Aperture library I never migrated from. Getting them was a pain (partially of my own making, partially due to Apple, partially just due to the passage of time).

For those who aren’t aware, Aperture was an app made by App for photographers. It was to iPhoto what Final Cut Pro is to iMovie or Logic is to Garageband, etc. I say was because Apple stopped develeoping it with the final release in 2014.

Finding the Hardware

Knowing ~roughly what computer I was using at the time, my old Mac Pro (mid-2010 model), I had a good starting point for the hunt. All I needed to do was get that computer powered up and look on its drive to see if its got what I want.

Thankfully I still actually have that machine! It’s been been sitting in the garage for nearly 5 years though (not in the house, or in a nice climate-controlled storage unit). After grabing the machine, I was actually surprised at how good of condition it was in. Mind you, the outside was absolutely filthy, but nothing a cloth couldn’t fix. After the outside was presentable, I cracked it open and was even more surprised: it was immaculate in there! Barely any dust, let alone the type of dirt and grime I saw on the outside. The machine is still 14 years old, and has a spinning hard drive in it, so I’m not home free yet, but things are looking promising.

Accessing the Data

Originally, I thought the photos I needed were in Lightroom and this would be a simple “import catalogue” operation. No, not so simple. As is obvious from the title of this post, I’m going to be importing from Aperture. Importing to what? Well, definitely into Lightroom since Aperture has long stopped existing, but more on that in a moment.

Lucky for me, Aperture was still installed on this machine. I was able to open it up and, lo and behold, there were the photos I was after. Also included, were photos going back to 2004. At this point, I took a detour to just look at a bunch of old photos 😂.

To move the data to my current machine, I initially just copied the Aperture library to an external drive, and then plugged that drive into my M1 MacBook Pro. However, despite Lightroom still listing “import from aperture” as a supported feature, it does not work in the slightest on my M1. After a little poking around, turns out, it doesn’t work for anyone on macOS Catalina or newer! (this was the release that dropped support for 32-bit apps. 32-bit x86 apps, mind you, so my M1 is doubly out-of-spec for it. help doc 1)

But hey, I’ve got this old Mac Pro that runs Aperture itself fine, surely it can run the import tool, right? Turns out, right! After intstalling Lightroom on the Mac Pro, I was able to create a new temporary Lightroom Catalogue and run the import tool. The tool saw my Aperture library, could count the photos, and offered to kick off the migration. So that’s what I did.

After 12 hours, it got stuck at 17%. Time to start again 🫠

to be continued …

… later, after a few more failed attempts, I decided I needed to split my Aperture library into (smaller) chunks. Exporting from the main one just ballooned memory usage and hung after completing around 17% of the process. I settled on creating a separate library for each year (which limiited things to around 25GiB of photos per library) and that seemed to work! The pixels are now flowing and my modern machine is slowly getting all those old photos added into its Lightroom catalogue.

Aimee is a happy photog 😄