I’m asking this question on behalf of someone else: Does anyone have experience with migrating photos, along with metadata, from Aperture to Tropy? Am I right in guessing it won’t be possible until Tropy supports importing through JSON-LD?
Aperture is a discontinued photo management program developed by Apple. It’s no longer compatible with the newest version of macOS, so someone is wondering whether it would be possible to migrate their hundreds of thousands of photos, including metadata and notes, to Tropy for Mac.
Yes, there is currently no straight-forward path to importing metadata (that is not embedded in the photos themselves). We’ll be adding the JSON-LD import (which will open the path to importing from other sources by converting to JSON-LD first) this fall.
How would this work? I know a bit of JSON, but not JSON-LD.
The Aperture database would be converted to JSON-LD and that contains references to the photos?
Keywords, Albums, Faces, and I can’t remember what else except that Aperture allowed lots of nesting of Folders and Albums IIRC.
Offhand it doesn’t seem like you’d get remotely close to Aperture’s functionality. No apps seem to have what Aperture had.
I haven’t used Aperture myself, but Tropy isn’t trying to be a photo editing app (Tropy’s photo editing features are mainly used to improve legibility), so porting your data is probably only fruitful if you’ve been using Aperture for managing primarily metadata.
That said, you’re right that you would have to define some sort of suitable mapping of your data to Tropy’s lists, tags, items, photos (and selections) using JSON-LD. I’m happy to help with such efforts once Tropy supports importing JSON-LD.