The hopelessness from switching to back to Lightroom from Aperture

Apple, why did you have to make me do this?

Back in around 2012 i switched over to Aperture after being a long time Lightroom-user since the early betas.

One of the reason was that the organizing was a workflow i could see myself have a lot of use for, seperating photos by visually represented albums. This was a feature i had been used to by using iPhoto at the time.

Also, by getting more and more into the Apple eco-system i could see a lot of other perks that would make a lot of sense.

All was fine and dandy until the day of 2014 when Apple announced Aperture would be discontinued and unsupported.

Apple recommended to switch to their new Photos-app, which was a reworked iPhoto, to continue for purposes related to photo editing and organizing.

In 2019 i knew the day would come any time soon that Aperture would stop working all together, and after updating to later versions of macOS it would be clear that my days were numbered by more and more spontaneous crashes happening while importing or editing photos.

My most obvious choice was of course to switch back to Lightroom Classic. A software i have already used before, been comfortable with and already had a license to by being a Creative Cloud-member. So i decided to start the process of moving my large library with over 1TB of photos to Lightroom Classic.

What i didnt know at the time was how painful the moving of the library was gonna be. You see, Adobe had made a migration tool for moving from Aperture to Lightroom Classic — which obviously sounded the best way for me. What Adobe didn’t tell me, that the internet later did, was how broken it was that in the end made me have to to spend a whole week before my library was moved over correctly.

Even if i knew that processing of the images would be lost, i atleast knew the tool would organize my Aperture-albums as Lightroom-collections. But it wasn’t until i started the migration that i understood that while importing — the migration tool would break in the import, with no error messages. Just a stalled percentage-meter. After trying this multiple times, i gave up on the tool and started looking elsewhere.

After some research i decided that the easiest way would be to start from scratch, and organize everything manually again. So i started doing a Library-relocation in Aperture (hence Aperture is primarily a managed library, meaning it’s all contained in a single file instead of a folder-structure) so it would be back to an organized folder-view.

After a few issues, trying to find the best folder-structure that would be supported in Lightroom afterwards, i decided to go with a YYYY-MM-DD folder structure, since that was a way that Lightroom Classic could handle future imports the same way with.

After some time with strange errors starting to occur when using the relocate-feature in Aperture a couple of times (because .xmpp files started to stall the relocating, which didn’t happen before but could be because Lightroom now also accessed the same files during my folder-structure-testing) then started the tedious work of reorganizing 12 years of photos as ‘Collections’.

After starting to organize photos in Collections, it didn’t take a long time that i felt that Lightroom Classic barely have made any larger improvement in usability or interface since i stopped using it. Sure, they have cleaned away some of the hideously outdated floral-patterns that came with earlier versions — but i would have hoped it would experience-wise have improved far greater in 7 years. Guess i was completely wrong.

I am not sure what has happened since 2012, but except support for some cameras and file-types and some new features inside Lightroom Classic it all feels the same. And in this, case im highly disappointed.

It’s such a simple feature to be honest, to organize files by Albums and get a quick visual overview of different events and happenings that has been taking place and let me get straight in to work-mode. But in Lightroom Classic, i feel like the joke is on me trying to find a single correct photo in a library with almost 50 000 photos.

Maybe it’s my workflow, but i cannot find a good replacement for this in Lightroom Classic how much i look at its features. And that’s not the only thing that irritate me with moving to Lightroom. Let’s get through some of them.

That is just some of them that irritates me to death, everytime i open Lightroom Classic. It feels like it has been left to die out, with Lightroom CC to replace it — which doesn’t fit my workflow in working with photos and have a hard time seeing professional users doing so also. Just the stamp of naming it “Lightroom Classic” makes this software feel as ancient as its user interface.

I have a hard time dealing with Lightroom Classic, but i still don’t see a range of other options either that can handle a large library of photos and with a lot of good features. Especially when there is now rumors that Aperture will stop working in future versions of macOS completely.

Have you been in the progress of moving over, or got some good tips and tricks to get me back in Club Lightroom? Let me know in a comment.

Related posts:

Contrary to popular belief this research has further shown it is not women’s cautious approach to investing that has kept them out of the market, but rather the fact they have historically had…

ACC 561 Week 6 Discussion. “ACC 561 Week 6 Discussion https://www.uopcourses.com/category/acc-561/” is published by kll sth.

Though we live in a digital age, people do have a thing for clocks, especially those that are worn on the wrist and these come in a multitude of varieties. These were analogue, then came the…