MacOS – Migrate from Aperture to Photos: use Catalina or Mojave

If all your edited photos are new versions of the original, then I'm guessing you've got Aperture set to create new versions when you make adjustments (that's an option in Preferences). In that case, then each photo is probably in a stack with all of its versions. Generally, only the "pick" (or top) of each stack is synced with your iOS device. So you need to go through your album and move all the edited versions to the top of their stacks.

To do this:

• Open your album in Aperture
• In the Stacks menu, choose Open All Stacks
• For each of the stacks in the album, choose the version you want and choose "Pick" under the Stacks menu. This will make the chosen version jump to the far left of the group.
  • I might be wrong on the name of that command, but I believe the shortcut for it is Command-\. That's what I usually use, instead of the menu option.

You can then re-sync your device, and the proper versions should show up. You might want to try it with one or two of them to make sure it works before doing it for all of them.

Additionally, you might want to turn off the option to create new versions for each adjustment. It'll mitigate this problem in the future. Aperture uses non-destructive editing anyway, so you're not making irreversible changes to the original no matter what. If you want to make multiple versions of a photo, you can do it manually with the Duplicate Version command (in the right-click menu on a photo, or somewhere in the menu options at the top).

Depending on how your Aperture library is set up, I think it will do this automatically.

If you use a referenced library (see the Aperture manual for more information on managed vs referenced), Aperture won't store the hi-res masters in its own library - it will leave the file management up to you. It does, however, keep a low-res preview of the image in the library. So you could store your images on an external HDD, but still have access to the low-resolution previews when the HDD isn't available.

I haven't tried this myself, so I'm not sure how small the previews are, but I'm guessing they'd be good enough for the purpose you're describing.