Saturday, December 04, 2010

Aperture Projects descriptions and iPhoto Event descriptions - what happens on iPhoto migration?

One of the problems with migrating from iPhoto to Aperture has been that all of the descriptions associated with iPhoto events and albums are lost.

In Aperture 3, however, projects now have descriptions ...

Working With the Project Info Window | Aperture Users Network

The Enter description field is a place to add descriptive text to add to your Project. This is a great concept, which we’ll talk about more in other tutorials, but essentially it’s designed to hold text to describe a whole Project as opposed to individual images in the Project. You can include any information you’d like here, and it’s searchable. For example, let’s say that you were doing a shoot for a client, but you didn’t want to add the client’s name to the metadata of your photos. You could add that to the Project description field and search for that later on.

Aperture 3 projects now behave like iPhoto events, they can be created automatically (fixed 1 day interval, less flexible than iPhoto). There's a good description of the project description field in this support thread. Along the way rwboyer mentions using a one page book template with a large text area for notes associated with project.

This is encouraging. So has Apple finally addressed a major issue with migrating from iPhoto to Aperture? Will event descriptions be saved in project descriptions?

I couldn't find any documentation on this, but it was easy to experiment. I created an iPhoto 8.1.2 Library with an annotated Event and imported that Library into Aperture. The iPhoto Library became an Aperture folder, and the iPhoto Event became an Aperture Project.

After I did this, the Aperture Project description field was ...

...

empty.

I would love to see Apple sued for false advertising when they claim Aperture 3 is a natural migration path for iPhoto users.

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