I imported pictures into Aperture from iPhoto and since then, added a lot of new ones. I'd like to start over because the dates on the tags/folders in which the pictures are organized are not consistent.

In effect, what I'm looking for is a way to do a re-import of all pictures in my current Aperture library (not that many... just over 1,000) to have it apply its import rules/magic to have it all sorted properly.

That feels like a hack, though. Is there a proper way to do this?

  • What rules? Aperture does nothing special on import. Have you explored the sorting options? – terrydev Sep 22 '11 at 22:28
  • This is a good question - for me I ended up using this little tool:bonephotosorter.codeplex.com But that forces me to organize the files up front and only works when adding new files if they are a newer date. I did not yet try the Export to folders in finder - that seems powerful, you might look at that. – jtreser Oct 5 '11 at 13:11

By default, there is not any magic when importing photos to aperture.

Probably at that point, what it might be confusing is that Aperture has transformed your iPhoto albums to folders/projects, which are not what you exactly want.

My advise would be to create one project, move all your images there, delete all other projects/folders, and then create new projects as desired.

Furthermore, you can find a lot of articles of how you may use projects/folders to organize your photographs, like this one.


I'm not sure what you mean when you write that the dates/tags are not consistent after import from iPhoto. Do you mean that those attributes are wrong in the metadata? Or that you have a folder structure organized by date, and the photos are in the wrong folders (but with correct metadata)?

If your situation is the latter, I had a similar problem when I moved from iPhoto to Aperture. At the time I wrote a little Applescript to help me reorganize. I won't post it unless you'd like to see it, as the code is very specific to my situation and probably won't be helpful to you. But in general, my approach was this:

  1. Create a set of folders by year (i.e. "2007", "2008", "2009")
  2. Identify a set of photographs to move (in my case the contents of a single large folder containing everything from iPhoto)
  3. Loop over each photograph, get the date from the EXIF data, and move it into the appropriately dated folder.

That sounds conceptually simple, and writing the script that way is fairly straightforward since Aperture has a good scripting dictionary. Remember that Aperture has both folders and projects, which is a slightly different nomenclature from iPhoto albums. You'll need to decide how you want to use projects and folders for organization. I use projects named by Year-Month, for example, with one giant folder of Archives and one folder of Current photos.

(I realize that I've resurrected an old discussion here, but this was a problem I've encountered just recently and I thought it would be helpful to document one possible solution)

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