Exporting from macOS Photos in 2024
January 27, 2024 10:51 AM Subscribe
Is there a good, clean way to export your photo library out of macOS Photos in 2024?
I've seen one or two apps in the app store that promise to do a better job than File->Exporting 26,000 pictures, but are any of them any good? I took a swing at it myself once, and while a directory with mumpty-thousand "February 23, 2003" and "December 25, 2006" and so on is better than poking around ~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/originals/, it's not great, either.
Mostly my goal is to be able to end up with something that's _reasonably_ ordered that I can put on an external backup medium for long term storage in the event I suffer some unrecoverable library database corruption. I mean, I know I can just copy the photos library to an external drive and say "good job, you've archived your pictures", but it's not a given that anything will be able to restore the organization from it in 10 or 15 years, y'know? Or even just offloading them onto my kids in my old age, a big old Library bundle probably is going to be an incomprehensible mess.
Honestly, if I could just export from Photos with an ISO8601 directory structure, that would almost be enough. "2003-01-23/" versus "January 23, 2003/", right? And if it comes to it, I mean I guess I could knock up a script to convert it... But if someone else already has, well, that saves me the trouble.
I've seen one or two apps in the app store that promise to do a better job than File->Exporting 26,000 pictures, but are any of them any good? I took a swing at it myself once, and while a directory with mumpty-thousand "February 23, 2003" and "December 25, 2006" and so on is better than poking around ~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/originals/, it's not great, either.
Mostly my goal is to be able to end up with something that's _reasonably_ ordered that I can put on an external backup medium for long term storage in the event I suffer some unrecoverable library database corruption. I mean, I know I can just copy the photos library to an external drive and say "good job, you've archived your pictures", but it's not a given that anything will be able to restore the organization from it in 10 or 15 years, y'know? Or even just offloading them onto my kids in my old age, a big old Library bundle probably is going to be an incomprehensible mess.
Honestly, if I could just export from Photos with an ISO8601 directory structure, that would almost be enough. "2003-01-23/" versus "January 23, 2003/", right? And if it comes to it, I mean I guess I could knock up a script to convert it... But if someone else already has, well, that saves me the trouble.
The absolute easiest way to do this is to turn on "Download Originals to this Mac" in the Photos.app settings and then use Time Machine to back up your machine.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 12:34 PM on January 27, 2024
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 12:34 PM on January 27, 2024
Response by poster: Oh, I should clarify - I already have all 26k pictures in a gigantic 220 gig photos library on my Mac. As well as the past year or two's worth as Image Capture exports from my phone in a separate folder structure. I have almost zero faith in the cloud in general, believe you me.
I mean, I use the syncing feature in Apple Music, but I have all the mp3s on my laptop its Time Machine, and backed up to my NAS a couple of different ways as well as on backblaze. But that's mostly because it's easier and cheaper than buying an iPhone that would be large enough to store it all. And worst case if the cloud screws it up, I can acquire the missing song again - but that picture of my wife at our wedding, though? It doesn't exist in nearly enough places, y'know?
posted by Kyol at 6:37 PM on January 27, 2024
I mean, I use the syncing feature in Apple Music, but I have all the mp3s on my laptop its Time Machine, and backed up to my NAS a couple of different ways as well as on backblaze. But that's mostly because it's easier and cheaper than buying an iPhone that would be large enough to store it all. And worst case if the cloud screws it up, I can acquire the missing song again - but that picture of my wife at our wedding, though? It doesn't exist in nearly enough places, y'know?
posted by Kyol at 6:37 PM on January 27, 2024
Your photo library is secretly just a directory that's specially treated like a file by MacOS (similar to how .app packages work). I'm not at my Mac right now but I believe there's a right-click command that lets you browse the contents and treat them like normal files.
That said, if these pictures are from your iPhone they're likely in HEIF format instead of JPEG.
posted by neckro23 at 10:09 PM on January 27, 2024
That said, if these pictures are from your iPhone they're likely in HEIF format instead of JPEG.
posted by neckro23 at 10:09 PM on January 27, 2024
neckro23 speaks truth, you can just control-click on "Photos Library.photoslibrary" and choose "Show Package Contents" to see the internal structure. But it's not remotely user-friendly without a lot of scripting; the file keys are all tucked away inside
Something like PowerPhotos is definitely easier than trying to roll your own.
posted by graphweaver at 7:50 PM on January 28, 2024
Photos.sqlite which appears to be a vanilla SQLite database.Something like PowerPhotos is definitely easier than trying to roll your own.
posted by graphweaver at 7:50 PM on January 28, 2024
Oh, that said, if you do find yourself rolling your own, the osxphotos package is an easy-to-use and well-maintained Python library that will get you started nicely.
posted by graphweaver at 7:52 PM on January 28, 2024
posted by graphweaver at 7:52 PM on January 28, 2024
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posted by theory at 12:34 PM on January 27, 2024 [4 favorites]