After acquiring a DSLR (this one) I decided to move from trusty old iPhoto to Aperture. I have about 6,000 photos in my library, many going way back. They’re all in Time Machine, so the move is less fraught with anxiety than it could be. But still, this sort of stuff is never painless. Also, I’m becoming less and less apt to tinker with software as I get older, so if something goes off the rails I’m more likely to call it off and retreat into the pocket of least resistance—or in this case, iPhoto and its overzealous virtual file system.

See, iPhoto stores separate copies of every action you perform on a photo. Rotate a shot? New version. Color correction? Ditto. What this means is that a drive will not only become littered with your original photos but their alternate versions as well. This would merely be a slight aggravation if it could be changed by ticking a check box somewhere. As you might have guessed, Apple chose not to provide such a preference. With that in mind, as well as the multitude of tools and options Aperture has over iPhoto, I made the jump this weekend. On the face of it, the process should have been easy; Aperture can natively import iPhoto libraries, after all. meaning there’s nothing too mysterious about getting the photos from one place to another. I was able to do that without any trouble. The snag came after the import, when I realized my new Aperture library was littered with all those alternate copies of many of my photos. Without a very good grasp on just what a “stack” is in Aperture, I was left without a way to quickly weed out the extra versions.

After a few hours of struggle, fiddling around with Smart Albums and importing and exporting things in various groups, I was rid of the duplicates. And the truth is I’m still not quite sure what I did. Whatever it was, between exporting a lot of junk and selectively re-importing it, I saved myself a gig or so of space. And I have to say Aperture is really nice. Somehow Aperture’s re-touchings seem more subtle than Photoshop’s; maybe it’s just the fact that I’ve been using Photoshop for so long that I can spot its use from a hundred yards away. I’m especially fond of Aperture’s gamma vignette tool, which is practically undetectable as a post processing trick.

All in all, I’d give my migration a 6 on the pain scale, with 1 being the Migration Assistant on recent Macs (yay!) and 10 being moving from XP to Vista (not yay!). Any Aperture tips or gripes out there?