Converting iPhoto and Aperture libraries

If you used iPhoto or Aperture before transitioning to Apple’s newer Photos app, up until macOS 12.0 Monterey, Photos has had the ability to migrate your old iPhoto/Aperture library to a Photos library. However, starting in macOS 13 Ventura, Apple no longer supports its migration process, leaving importing the iPhoto library into an existing Photos library as the only option. This is far from ideal, because unlike migration, importing does not retain your album organization, photo edits, or photo metadata in the process.

If you want to preserve all that information from your iPhoto or Aperture library, you can instead use PowerPhotos to convert your old library to an equivalent Photos library. To start, choose the File > Convert iPhoto/Aperture libraries menu item. PowerPhotos will search your Mac for any iPhoto/Aperture libraries it can find, and allow you to add them to the PowerPhotos library list. You can also just drag an iPhoto/Aperture library directly from the Finder and drop it into the library list.

Once the library is in the PowerPhotos library list, you can view it alongside all your Photos libraries, so you can see how many photos it has, what albums it contains, and even view or search the photo metadata, just like with your Photos libraries. You cannot use any functions that modify the iPhoto library, such as deleting duplicates, creating albums, and so forth, but in all other respects you can do all the same things you can with a Photos library.

If you simply want to convert the library to Photos, select the library and click the “Convert…” button in the upper right. This will create a new Photos library and copy the entire contents of the iPhoto/Aperture library into the new library. You can also set up a merge to merge the iPhoto/Aperture library directly into an existing Photos library, or copy individual albums or photos by drag and drop.

PowerPhotos conversion process does differ from the old Photos migration in a few ways.

Photos Migration	PowerPhotos Conversion
Preserves albums, folders, and smart albums	Preserves folders and albums, converts smart albums into regular albums
Preserves photo titles, captions, keywords, dates, locations, and faces	Preserves all the same metadata except for faces
Converts star ratings and flags into keywords	Same
Preserves photo edits, but not lossless editing	Same
Books are converted to albums	Doesn’t preserve books
Preserves slideshows	Doesn’t preserve slideshows
Always creates new library alongside original	Choose any folder to create the new library, or merge/copy directly into an existing library
Always migrates the entire library	Allows copying individual photos/albums out of the library as well
Saves space by linking photos from the old library	Makes new copies of the photos, requiring additional disk space
Works only on macOS Monterey and earlier	Works on macOS Monterey and later
Does not support libraries before iPhoto 8	Supports iPhoto 2 or later and Aperture 3.3 or later

Converting from Aperture

Because PowerPhotos’ conversion process is based on its predecessor, iPhoto Library Manager, there are some aspects of Aperture libraries that will not be preserved when converting an Aperture library. The primary things of note are as follows.

Projects: iPhoto had the concept of “events”, which divided up photos into groups based on the date they were taken, and could be later customized and rearranged by the user. Photos does not have a similar concept, so iPhoto events are converted into albums in the resulting Photos library, and will be stored inside a folder named “iPhoto Events”.

Aperture had a similar structure it called “projects” (not to be confused with iPhoto/Photos projects, e.g. books, calendars, etc.), which worked much the same way. The main difference was that iPhoto events were stored as a single flat list, whereas Aperture projects could be organized into a hierarchy. PowerPhotos does not support restoring the project hierarchy, and will instead recreate the projects as a flat list in the “iPhoto Events” folder.

Keywords: Aperture supported organizing its keywords into a hierarchy as well, but Photos keeps its keywords as a flat list, so keywords coming from an Aperture library will lose their hierarchical arrangements.

Labels: Aperture supported assigning color labels to photos. These are not converted by PowerPhotos

Stacks: Photos that have been grouped into “stacks” in Aperture will appear as individual items in the resulting Photos library.

Previews: Aperture had a setting labelled “Generate Previews” which controlled whether it would create and store a rendered JPG inside the library for any photo that had been edited. This was enabled by default, but could be disabled if you wanted to save disk space by not storing a separate JPG for every photo you had edited, and instead taking a small speed hit when viewing an edited photo while Aperture had to reapply its edits to show the photo. If you’re using PowerPhotos to convert an Aperture library that had this setting disabled, then it will not be able to retain the edits for any photo that was edited, and you’ll end up with just the original, unmodified photo in the resulting Photos library.

Vaults: Aperture vaults (which end in a .apvault file extension instead of .aplibrary) are not supported by PowerPhotos.