Adobe Provides Lightroom Transition Guide
Adobe is featuring a timely Aperture to Lightroom guide on its website. The six-page PDF provides step-by-step instruction on how to migrate from Apple’s dearly departed photo editing software to Adobe’s Lightroom. The two programs use different processing engines, so adjustments made in Aperture won’t make the transition. Adobe recommends saving Aperture’s images as TIFF files in addition to the original to provide side-by-side comparison when opening those images in Lightroom.
The guide gives a decent breakdown of items that won’t survive the transition—including flags, color labels, and custom metadata fields. The biggest help the guide provides is a set of workarounds for those items left behind. Adobe recommends sorting items into Smart Albums based on attributes, then manually adding keywords to match.
There is mention of a forthcoming migration assistant tool, but no indication on its availability. While you can continue to use Aperture, it probably makes sense to make the switch to Lightroom sooner rather than later and avoid having to perform these steps under the stress of a deadline.