[turtle]

I'm a champion of Aperture too. I haven't used Lightroom, but I've heard it has the same feature set.

From your workflow description, you need one of the two listed. You have way too many steps and you loose a whole lot of time in your current method.

The way I do it is to have an Automator workflow that detects a card being inserted and then downloads them to a folder organized by RAW and JPEG. In the RAW folder I also have it copy in a set of Adobe DNG converters to "future proof" the RAW images. Once the folder hits about 4GB I burn it to a DVD for archive. I weed after they are burned to ensure I don't accidentally delete an image I really could need. So now I have many images on DVD that Aperture will tell me which disk I need to put in if I need to use the master copy.

This keeps my Aperture library physically small and yet I have access to good quality previews of all the images.

Originally Posted by Phoenix ... Also if Aperture is the easiest program to effectively do what i need, what would be the best way to import all my current photos? I believe there are several different import settings and want to get it right the first time.

I forgot the answer this one in my post; you can keep your current archive style and just have each session saved as it's own project or you can use multiple folders in one project. When you import them, be sure to select to import "In Current Location" in the right hand pane of the import window.

Projects are limited to 10,000 images though so you might use a combination of methods for projects and folders. I have one project that handles my "Family" images and them a project for each class. For my event shots I do one project per shoot. This way I don't accidentally merge events. The only exception to this is a known sequence that is spread over time.