Aperture crashes importing large iPhoto libraries

Question

You wouldn't believe the trouble I am going through to import a 50,000-photo iPhoto Library. Since Aperture crashes while trying to import it, I must break up the iPhoto library into pieces. Since iPhoto can't export its database and photos intact unless you export to DVD, I am forced to export part of the library to 1 DVD at a time. Thankfully, I have a dual-layer burner on a new PowerBook or this process would take twice as many DVDs. But I'm still using about a dozen dual-layer DVDs just to export, then using the DVDs to re-import to a blank iPhoto Library and then importing each of those one at a time into Aperture.
All because Apple has no export to hard drive feature in iPhoto (maintaining structure and keywords and originals/mods), and because Apple's Aperture crashes on import of a large iPhoto library.
Ridiculous.

Answer 1

I have the same problem. I have about 15,000 photos in my iPhoto library that I've attempted 5 times to import unsuccessfully. The most recent tries had Aperture crash after 6439 (8746) images and 2620 (3667) images. The numbers in parentheses are the number of actual unstacked photos, since it imports two photos for any photo you editted in iPhoto (which I quite like).
I've read the crash reports, and I'm not certain why/where it is crashing, since the thread it says crashed has almost no debug info in it.
I attempted to import one roll at a time using the Import Files... dialog, and pointing it to the iPhoto Library. That was working, but given the hundreds of rolls I had, would have taken me a month of doing to get it done manually.
I am using a pair of external drives to do the import. One, a LaCie portable laptop drive, on FW400, has the iPhoto library. The other, a LaCie desktop FW800 drive, has the new Aperture library. Don't know if that is relevant.
I am fairly certain that for every file imported, Aperture is touching at least 20-30 files, based upon my perusal of the filesystem structure.
To bad it can't just figure out where it left off (which I can easily do by looking around the filesystem). For example, to get an estimate of the number of photos imported so far:
AdmiralOSX:/Volumes/MediaLibraryBottom/Aperture Library.aplibrary/iPhoto Library/Rolls$ ls /importgroup | grep -v '^$' | fgrep -v \: | wc -l
8297
To see which roll is importing:
AdmiralOSX:/Volumes/MediaLibraryBottom/Aperture Library.aplibrary/iPhoto Library/Rolls$ ls -lrt | tail -1
drwxr-xr-x 8 XXXX XXXX 272 Dec 9 04:07 2004-08-17 Roll 80.approject
And so forth.
Cheers,
Doug