Dates get randomly changed when importing folders into Aperture

Question

I am in the process of migrating my iPhoto pictures over to Aperture. Because I have close to 100k pictures and short clips, I can not import my entire 500 GB library at once because I don't have enough hard drive space to support both iPhoto and Aperture libraries at the same time. I also thought it might make sense to not have one gigantic library. Also I would like to have my old photos separated by years, and I don't know if Aperture would do this if I imported the entire iPhoto library (which does only separate them by events) at once. So it appears to me that the only import method that would work (please correct me if this is wrong) would be to open the "Masters" directory of iPhoto in the Finder, and drag and drop each year's directory into the "Projects/Library" panel in Aperture. Note that I do not want any editing information preserved from iPhoto, so using the Masters seems to be the most space efficient thing. So far so good but there appear to be at least two big snags. Firstly the yellow projects folders within each blue years folder in Aperture are not in chronological but in alphabetical order and I can't find out how to fix this. Secondly (and much more problematically) the dates on many old photos have been altered in an apparent random manner during the import into Aperture! Therefore they do appear in the wrong locations in my events library, according to the altered date. There are many too many photos that have been changed to undo this manually (I estimate it would take several weeks to do this).
But how and why could this have happened in the first place?
I also noticed that even when I change the dates of the Aperture masters to the true ones (by comparing to the masters in iPhoto), they still remain in the same wrong location in my Projects/Events library, according to the date originally (and falsely) assigned by Aperture.
There surely has to be a way to import photos into Aperture without ruining their date stamp?
Thanks in advance for your help!

Answer 1

Hi iScientist,
If I understand you correctly I should not import iPhoto Masters directly, because they have been altered to be in some kind of internal organization scheme. What I'm confused about is that I thought the "Masters" in iPhoto were just untouched camera files?
Yes, I would also be confused. The more I think about it, the less I know why anything wrong. You stated that you don't care about any adjustments you made in Aperture, so why wouldn't be okay to "reach into" iPhoto's internal database and pull out the masters? Good question. The only thing I can come up with: Maybe that folder isn't really what you think it is.
Were you able look at the metadata in Preview after finding one of the problematic masters in the iPhoto library again? That might give a clue.
When you say "regular way", do you mean going to "Import -> iPhoto library"? The problem with this, it seems, is that my entire iPhoto library will be imported that way, however I would like to import it chunks, split in years and on different physical media
Yes, that is what I meant. There have been various topics in this forum concerning how to import parts of the iPhoto library. I cannot seem to find any relevant posts at the moment. Perhaps someone else has better luck searching...
In any case, you may be better off using *referenced masters* instead of multiple libraries. With multiple libraries, your photos will be disjointed by whatever scheme you devise (like years). So, when you're looking at 2011, and you want that Christmas photo from 2010, you will need to close Aperture and restart it with a new library.
With referenced masters, you choose to store a particular set of *masters only* (maybe all of them) in another location. You can put different sets of masters in different places. For instance, you can have one project on one external hard drive, and a different project on a different external drive. Your versions, metadata, previews, thumbnails, all stay in the library. In this way, you can at least view screen-sized versions of last Christmas even if your "2010" external hard drive is not connected.
Looking at manual for references to referenced may be good for you before you delve too deep into this.
What I meant by order being unchanged/the file being in the wrong location is that in the chronologically organized projects overview the projects that were imported with the wrong date, which I changed to the correct date in Metadata, still appear in the wrong location.
Ahh, that is a bug that users discovered a little while ago. It took me a while to re-find the thread, but you can read up on that here. I (among others hopefully) have provided feedback to Apple concerning that bug.
[http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=12981789&#12981789]
I didn't think about that view because that view is not generally as useful as the list view in the Inspector pane. That view is new to Aperture 3 and in my opinion was built to make the transition for users of iPhoto easier.
nathan