Moving from Lightroom to Aperture

Question

I've had Lightroom running on my iMac, but am looking at moving to Aperture on the quick recommendation of a pro photogapher friend.  I haven't upgraded LR along the way, and so I'd be looking at buying the full program, which is more expensive than Aperture.  And per my friend, workflow is pretty simple with Aperture, which sounds appealing.  He's promised to give me a short tutorial on how to make Aperture work well for my needs
I have actually done very little in terms of reworking pictures in LR, so there's very little LR "work" to save.  I have the originals on an external hard drive, organized into folders: Family Events, Travel, Kids Sports, etc.  There are subfolders for various events (Dad's 75th birtday, etc.).  My guess (not knowing much about Aperture) is that I should be well set up to bring these images into Aperture, and off I'd go.  I could probably leave my LR catalog alone, since I don't have much work to retain.
Does this make sense, more or less?  I should note that I do expect to have more time going forward to devote to working on my pictures, and I do have quite a few on that external drive (which is backed up, of course).  thx

Answer 1

Michael Winner wrote:
...workflow is pretty simple with Aperture, which sounds appealing.  He's promised to give me a short tutorial on how to make Aperture work well for my needs
Your friend is more optomistic than I am. IMO although one can evolve a simple workflow, there is a significant but worthwhile learning curve. I recommemnd fully completing one of the tutorials available.
Put 8 GB RAM in your iMac before starting so you can be sure any anomalies are not RAM-based. Also note that Aperture is a hardware hog.
I have the originals on an external hard drive, organized into folders: Family Events, Travel, Kids Sports, etc.  There are subfolders for various events (Dad's 75th birtday, etc.).  My guess (not knowing much about Aperture) is that I should be well set up to bring these images into Aperture, and off I'd go. 
Yes on bringing them into Aperture. During import set to "Store Files: in their current location" so that you stay with what is called a referenced-Masters workflow. However moving forward you should lose the folder-think organization. Instead import Dads 76th as a (date based) Project, and use Keywords to identify things like Family Events.
My comments from an earlier thread:
First, Projects should be just that: individual-shoot based projects rather than some kind of organizing tool for all the architectural photos or whatever. For performance reasons personally I keep each Project under 500 20-MB images, making a second Project if the shoot is large (e.g. 110829_KJones_Wed_B). One or more albums will always organize the KJones wedding pix together anyway.
Folders are indeed flexible organizational tools but IMO often overused. Folders can effectively hide contents from view and therefore require users to remember how folders are nested and what is inside them. Folders were the only way to deal with single-original film, but are IMO limiting to image database thinking.
The way I look at it conceptually:
Aperture is a database, and each image file lives in one Project.
Albums are just collections of Pointers that point to individual image files living in one or more Projects. Since they just contain pointers, albums can be created or deleted at will without affecting image files. Very powerful.
Keywords can be applied to every image separately or in batches. Keywords are hugely powerful and largely obviate the need for folders. Not that we should never use folders, just that we should use folders only when useful organizationally - - after first determining that using keywords and albums is not a better approach.
As one example imagine the keyword "flowers."  Every image of 100k images that has some flowers in it has the keyword flowers. Then say we want to put flowers in an ad, or as background for a show of some kind, or to print pix for a party, or even just to look for an image for some other reason. We can find every flower image in a 100k-image database in 2 seconds, and instantly create an Album called "Flowers" that points to all of those individual images.
Similarly all family pix can have a keyword "family" and all work pix can have a key word "work." Each individual pic may have any number of keywords.
So by using keywords and albums we can have instant access to every image everywhere, very cool. And keywords and albums essentially take up no space in the database.
Another approach is to use a folder "Family" for family pix, a folder "Flowers" for flowers pix and another folder "Work" for work pix. IMO such folders usage is a very poor approach to using an images database (probably stemming from old paper or film work practices). Note that one cannot put an image with family in a field of flowers at a work picnic in all three folders.
HTH
-Allen