Hacker News Reader

Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

After Apple suddenly (and still no longer "officially") killed Aperture, I no longer trust them with long-term data storage. So no "Photos" for me.

I am still thinking about how to deal with the collection that I have in Aperture.

And before you respond with "just keep the files" or "export the files and import into Lightroom", it's no longer 1999 and it's not just about the files. There is metadata, tags, collections, stacks, and other kinds of organizational structure that are not easily reflected in a directory hierarchy.

I've been bitten once, I won't be fooled again — this time I intend to develop my own solution for keeping this data in the long term.

View on HN

Lightroom has a new importer to pull in Aperture data, including tags and all of that...so it's not really a "export the files and import into Lightroom" situation - it appears it should preserve your metadata.

http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2014/10/aperture-imp...

Unfortunately, the Aperture and Lightroom data models and workflow are different enough that Lightroom really can't import everything that you've done in Aperture. Quote from Lightroom page: "migrate their images and key metadata"... It also doesn't support the non-destructive workflow edits that you've applied to your (potentially) tens of thousands of images. If you import them, all the edits become baked in.

Photos will undoubtedly import Aperture metadata. It's disingenuous to assume otherwise.

It will import some, but some are not supported at all because the Aperture data model is more complex and complete than Photos'...

I moved over 35k photos from Aperture to Photo Supreme for organization/metadata and DxO for editing. Photo Supreme will read Aperture libraries and much of the metadata. The capability was pretty crude when I did it (mostly relied on it to recreate my hierarchical keywording system), but it's come a long way. Best part is that the database is only for speed—everything gets stored in the image files themselves or sidecars.

DxO is pure magic. It's been a joy going back and reprocessing my images—they look so much better now. The Clear View slider does wonderful things on landscape shots.

A nice touch is that Photo Supreme understands basic DxO edits, so things like rotation and cropping get reflected in the thumbnail.

I'm sad that I feel the only way to get a handle on my photos is to put them in Facebook or Flickr. For example, there was the OpenPhoto kickstarter, but even though the code is open source, their hosted service (since renamed to Trovebox) is shutting down next month.

There's also Origami, where the team and product were split in an acquihire/aquire under eFamily.com.

Do you have opinions on any of the current open-source programs, like Darktable [1]? Or by "I intend to develop my own solution" do you mean writing something from scratch?

[1] http://www.darktable.org/about/features/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com