XMP
Adobting Aperture
Jun 02, 2008 @ 06:01 PM - Filed in:
Tips
One thing that bothers me about
Aperture, Microsoft’s Expression Media (formly iView Media Pro),
and Adobe’s Lightroom is neither company has what I call
“transition tools”. How do I go from whatever solution I’m using
now to adobting your grand new image management application?
Because of XMP support, Expression Media and Lightroom probably are farther along than Aperture (yeah I know Aperture can read embedded XMP and can output XMP files but that output is limited and Aperture can’t read XMP sidecar files). However as far as I know neither Adobe nor Microsoft help current film users, users of a competitor’s product, users of even a custom made database, etc etc etc to switch to their solution. I’m surprised users go through with the move anyway, myself included.
Not all is lost when trying to move to Aperture, you just have to do some of the grunt work yourself. Say you want to move from Expression Media to Aperture or Lightroom to Aperture but you want to save all your metadata. Well first of all, your Lightroom adjustments will not work with Aperture because Adobe and Apple don’t use the same adjustments nor write the data to disk the same way. However your IPTC and custom metadata can careover to Aperture.
I’m not going to tell you exactly how to go about it. However, I will tell you the answer lies in the usage of Applescript, a tool named, exiftool, and the XMP sidecars. exiftool is the Swiss Army knife of metadata tools and among many other things it can read and write XMP files. So the idea is to read data from an XMP sidecar file for a particular image found in a directory, store it, then find that same image within your Aperture Library, you then write that data to the appropriate field within Aperture using Applescript. Of course this is probably not the only answer to the problem, perhaps others exists. This is just one I have discovered.
If you feel like going down this path, be sure to get a copy of the Exif v2.2.1 specification and the IPTC specification for IIM (Aperture 2.x does not yet support IPTC Core. Because of this you may end up losing some data, but you could keep it around by using custom fields. Not exactly ideal, but worth thinking about.). The specs may help you map out the fields between the applications as well as map the fields within the XMP file.
Because of XMP support, Expression Media and Lightroom probably are farther along than Aperture (yeah I know Aperture can read embedded XMP and can output XMP files but that output is limited and Aperture can’t read XMP sidecar files). However as far as I know neither Adobe nor Microsoft help current film users, users of a competitor’s product, users of even a custom made database, etc etc etc to switch to their solution. I’m surprised users go through with the move anyway, myself included.
Not all is lost when trying to move to Aperture, you just have to do some of the grunt work yourself. Say you want to move from Expression Media to Aperture or Lightroom to Aperture but you want to save all your metadata. Well first of all, your Lightroom adjustments will not work with Aperture because Adobe and Apple don’t use the same adjustments nor write the data to disk the same way. However your IPTC and custom metadata can careover to Aperture.
I’m not going to tell you exactly how to go about it. However, I will tell you the answer lies in the usage of Applescript, a tool named, exiftool, and the XMP sidecars. exiftool is the Swiss Army knife of metadata tools and among many other things it can read and write XMP files. So the idea is to read data from an XMP sidecar file for a particular image found in a directory, store it, then find that same image within your Aperture Library, you then write that data to the appropriate field within Aperture using Applescript. Of course this is probably not the only answer to the problem, perhaps others exists. This is just one I have discovered.
If you feel like going down this path, be sure to get a copy of the Exif v2.2.1 specification and the IPTC specification for IIM (Aperture 2.x does not yet support IPTC Core. Because of this you may end up losing some data, but you could keep it around by using custom fields. Not exactly ideal, but worth thinking about.). The specs may help you map out the fields between the applications as well as map the fields within the XMP file.