Last week, I finally gave up on a long-time personal policy that neatly divided my entire collection of images between professional photographs and personal pictures, between Aperture and iPhoto.

I've decided to move everything and merge my entire collection into a single place: Aperture.

It was not an easy decision to make. But after thinking about it for some time, and weighing the pros and cons, I finally decided that it is the best thing to do. As an independent photographer, I want to see everything in a single interface.

Since Aperture came out, I somehow got this idea of using it exclusively for my professional photography. I therefore continued using iPhoto for my personal pictures. And for a very long time, the separation was neat, simple, and practical.

Until, I started coming up with images that seems to defy my idea of Aperture and iPhoto separation and categorization. And through the years, I also somehow picked up the habit of preferring to use Aperture's tools more and more, even for my personal photos.

What I would do is to bring up the iPhoto browser in Aperture. At first, it was just a few images every now and then until it became somewhat the norm, specially because I've been using many different cameras (including the iPhone's camera). This practice turned out to be habitual that the distinct line of separation became a blur. In other words, I ended up with a big mess. And so, tired and confused, I thought long and hard, and that's when I finally decided to migrate all iPhoto images into my main Aperture library, with the actual images stored in, and referenced from, several external drives.

Making the decision to bring both professional and personal images together under Aperture wasn't easy. For one thing, I knew I was going to give up some of the functionalities that I have come to like in iPhoto. The idea of bringing everything together under a "single roof" may not even be the best thing for a lot of photographers. But it made sense to me. The main reason why I decided to do this is because I've come to always use Aperture anyway, even when the pictures are stored in iPhoto's library. And to keep everything organized, I need to deal only with a single library.

Since I have so many images in iPhoto that spanned years, the migration took some time. It afforded me a long nap. Thankfully, and because of its seamless integration with Aperture, I didn't encounter any major problem. And except for slideshows, books and Smart Albums (which wasn't really a big deal to me, but which may be for others), everything is now in Aperture the way it was organized in iPhoto. In a single interface, with every image within easy reach, I feel I am now able to better manage both my current professional and personal photographs, and even every other types of pictures that may fall in between.

Aperture's flexible Projects management made organizing the unification of images very easy. Capitalizing on this strength, with Projects and Albums, I was able to quickly put everything in order, in exactly the way I wanted, and on top of the already existing order and arrangements from iPhoto. If in case I need to tweak the organization some more, which I am sure I'll eventually do, it's comforting to know that I can easily do it. Two other tools helped me organize the images: Keywords and Metadata. I relied heavily on keywords and metadata to group collections into Smart Albums. This way of organizing was very helpful, and as a bonus, it gave me a fresh perspective into my current collection.

Now, this is not to say that I'm saying goodbye to iPhoto for good. Actually, I'm not ready to totally give up on iPhoto. It's just empty right now. I have a feeling that I will be using iPhoto again, and probably sooner than expected, for things that I may not be able to do in Aperture. When that time comes, and because of the tight integration between Aperture and iPhoto, I know that I can browse the Aperture library from within iPhoto, and do what I have to do there.