photos 10 open aperture libraries

Photos won't be able to open an Aperture library but you should be able to import an Aperture library into an existing Photos 10 library. However, you will not get all of the organizational effort you put into the Aperture library.

But as Richard.Taylor mentioned the paid version of PowerPhotos can merge Aperture libraries into Photos libraries and maintain albums, most metadata, smart albums and projects (but only as regular albums), etc.

A comparison of a Photos import vs a PowerPhotos merge is shown in this user tip: Merging/Importing iPhoto/Photos library into Another Photos Library: PowerPhotos vs Photos.

PowerPhotos is the best utility for Photos libraries.

kobalt wrote: … I dont want to risk it messing up my Aperture library.

I would make a backup copy before messing with it.

You should look into the trusted 3rd party app PowerPhotos ($30) which conserves as much as possible of iPhoto and Aperture Libraries in conversions. Here is a discussion from their web site:

https://www.fatcatsoftware.com/powerphotos/VersionedDocs/v7/migrate_libraries.html

More people use this for converting iPhoto, but you can get the idea. The the folks there are good at answering questions.

Full Disclosure: I use PowerPhotos all the time for copying stuff from one Library to another, and for many other things, but I have not used it for converting an Aperture Library. And if I ever used it for converting my iPhoto Libraries, it was too long ago to remember.

I would check out Avalanche for migrating Aperture to Photos (or anything else at this point).

https://cyme.io/avalanche-photo-conversion/

Having used Aperture for so long are you sure Photos is the app for you? It's a considerable step down.

Darktable has. something called a light table. Not sure if it's the same but it's an open source app so you can check it out for free.