From iPhoto to Aperture and now back to iPhoto?

Question

Hi, all:
About 15 months ago, I bought and dl'd a copy of Aperture from the App Store because it was so much cheaper than retail.  What I've realized, though, is that I bit off more than I can chew, in terms of features and learning curve, and I would like to move everything back to iPhoto.
What's the best way to do this?
I appreciate any and all feedback.
Thanks!
Bill in CT

Answer 1

Aperture and iPhoto are entirely different applications that work in very different ways.
The only communication between the two is as follows:
Aperture is able to parse the iPhoto Library to allow it to import the contents while stacking the Originals and Modified versions, preserving metadata and so forth.
Aperture can share its Previews with the iLife apps, including iPhoto.
That's it.
So, specifically, what interaction there is between the two is designed to facilitate migration from iPhoto to the more powerful app. After that, iPhoto has exactly the same relationship to the Aperture Library as, say, Pages or iMovie.
iPhoto has no knowledge of, and knows nothing of how the Aperture Library works. It cannot read the Aperture library. If you want to migrate back to iPhoto:
1. Export all your Masters to the Finder
2. Export all your Versions (if you choose to... but note the caveat below)
You can write the metadata to the files on export - check out the Export presets. Note that you cannot export Faces. There is no convention for sharing Faces. The best you can do is use Faces as a basis for keywording.
Import them from the Finder into iPhoto.
And here's the caveat: Note that there is no way to associate the masters with the versions in iPhoto, so you'll have apparent duplicates if you choose to import the versions
Regards
TD