Been a while….

…..since my last post. Other things have intervened including trying to find some old missing images. Eventually found a solution which may help others.

Some years ago I used the Apple Aperture programme for all my imaging work. Sadly Apple discontinued Aperture in favour of Photos. I could not get on with Photos and moved to Lightroom Classic (as it is now called). So far so good especially as Lightroom included a plugin to enable the transfer from Aperture.

But then disaster struck. Nothing to do with Aperture or Lightroom - all to do with a moment of madness entirely down to my incompetence in not thinking things through. The result being I “lost” a large number of images from Lightroom, along with their individual backups, and the Lightroom “backups”. I managed to rescue a few images from other locations, but eventually ran into the issue of needing an old image which was no longer on the system anywhere, or so I thought.

But a week or so ago, was clearing out the large amount of old “stuff” in our loft and came across an old external hard disk I had totally forgotten about. That disk contained old Time Machine backups from years ago, and after managing to access it, i discovered one of the backups was the very very old Aperture library file!

But Lightroom has moved on and will no longer import images from Aperture! Eventually discovered that Photos will do so! So what has followed and taken hours and hours, was to import from Aperture Library into Photos, and then export from Photos to a temporary folder from which I could then import into Lightroom. Actually an easy, if long winded, process, as it appears Photos does not like importing too great a number of images in one go.

So I ended up with some 3000+ images imported into Lightroom, all of which needed cataloging, and still need keywording which will take many more hours.

So what are the lessons.

Firstly think things through before acting - in fact think them through twice.

Secondly backup everything somewhere before acting.

Thirdly, one day, those ancient backups could be useful if you can find them.

Fourthly don’t have moments of madness or incompetence!

And now back to keywording.