what_iphoto_20090106 I'm stumped. I've been using Aperature for just over a year now, ever since I got my Canon 40D in December of 07 and decided to make the switch to shooting completely in RAW. I have a photo library of approximately 16,000 pictures. Due to the great new features in iPhoto 09 such as Faces, Places and the older (but awesome) feature known as Events, I wish to switch back. The problem is, I search on Google, I search on the Aperture and iPhoto support discussion boards at Apple.com, I search everywhere I can think of, and I cannot find anyone with a solution (only lots of other people with the same problem). Apparently there is no native, built-in, way to switch from Aperture BACK to iPhoto (only iPhoto to Aperture).

If I Export Versions or Export Masters in Aperture, its going to spit them out as PNGs, JPGs or TIFFs rather than the Canon RAW files. My Photo library is about 80 GB in size. I do not wish to save an old copy of it just to preserve the RAW versions of all my pics. I really love the organizational aspects of iPhoto but wish to retain Aperture as my editing software. My ideal workflow would be: connect the camera to the comp, import the pics into iPhoto, post processes them in Aperture, but have them remain stored in iPhoto's library (and in iPhoto's library only). I do not wish to have 2 seperate libraries to maintain, and to only use Aperture as an editor.

Does anyone have a solution for this?

Update: After much thought, the only solution I can think of is to export a TIFF (best quality image type out of the 3 - JPG, TIFF, PNG) of the Versions of all my photos I've taken. This will allow all of my editing I've done to my pics be preserved. Then I can simply export all of my Masters in RAW format to a diff location and then back them up for safe keeping. Going forard, iPhoto will import my RAW masters into its library and save duplicate versions of any editing I make to the pics. This isn't the IDEAL solution but it seems to be the best option available to me at the moment. In the future my workflow is as such: Import pics from Canon 40D into iPhoto 09, any editing of these pics is done through iPhoto's option of "Use External Editor" which would be Aperture for me. Then the edited versions are saved back into iPhoto's library. If I need to every do any editing of my photos previous to Jan 29, 2009, I just go back and dig up the old RAW's that I've backed up of them.

Anyone see an issue with this plan?