IPTC EXIF Core Transfer - LR Migration

Question

I want to thank the guys that weighed on my last post regarding strategies for getting out of Aperture with my content.
Hard lesson learned. Without too much detail, here is what I'm slowly doing ( perhaps it might help others )
Consilidate ALL my masters from different drives into one place.
Go through every folder and CONVERT all color tags, flags, ratings into KEYWORDS
Export a full JPG version from MASTER and export a full JPG version with my edits.
Start slowly rebuilding my 'Aperture' Library on a dedicated hard drive.
The lesson here if it's not obvious, is NEVER let a program 'own' your RAW images, like I did in Aperture, Keep them pure and use programs like LR that 'look' to the files on a drive and just store metadata and edit stacks. Aperture will not give you back your RAW images, and exporting out to TIFFs will blow up any library of significant size.
I would be happy to hear any criticism or addendum of those going through the same migration.
One thing that I need clarity on - are ALL the 'info' fields in Aperture exported ( IPTC, EXIF, Large Caption, etc, etc ) along with the image ? I assume folks have already hammered this out going into LR ?
For what it's worth, I've been toying with LR the last few weeks. While it has some lackings in file management - it's a pretty amazing program. If you're a designed, the integration with Photoshop and smart exports is worth the pain alone.

Answer 1

The lesson here if it's not obvious, is NEVER let a program 'own' your RAW images, like I did in Aperture, Keep them pure and use programs like LR that 'look' to the files on a drive and just store metadata and edit stacks.
I'm not sure you've grasped what LR does. It does *exactly* the same as Aperture, just has different options for storing the Raw files. With Aperture and Lightroom (and Capture One etc) they all just "look to the files" and store metadata and edit stacks. The problem is if you migrate then LR doesn't read Aperture edits in editable form, nor does it read Capture One, and Capture One doesn't read LR and vice versa and so on. They all use proprietary formats for storing the edit history. So, if in a few years you migrate from Lightroom to something else, unless someone has written a very specific tool, you'll be facing exactly the same issues. Anyone writing such a tool will likely face significant legal issues as these proprietary formats are protected. Trade secrets and all that.
Aperture will not give you back your RAW images, and exporting out to TIFFs will blow up any library of significant size.
Have you explored that whole File -> Export -> Original thing? That gets my Raw images back.