exiftool VS icloud_photos_downloader

If you're doing a pipelined bulk processing pass to add metadata tags after extracting them via Speech to text, or have delimited notes in a text file, or ... etc.

You might find ExifTool useful.

It's pure commandline (with a few third party GUI's IIRC) multiplatform and purpose built to display, edit, add media tags to all sorts of AV files.

https://exiftool.org/

> Any method that I've found to clean them up (exporting the originals, deleting them from the library, and then re-importing the JPEGs only seems easiest) will lose all of the years of metadata that I've built up in the library.

The open source tool osxphotos (https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos) can help with this. You can export the JPEG images while preserving metadata using the thrid-party exiftool utility:

`osxphotos export /path/to/export --has-raw --skip-raw --exiftool`

This exports all images that have a raw pair but skips the raw component then uses exiftool (https://exiftool.org/) to write the metadata (keywords, etc.) to the exported JPEG files. You can then re-import these into photos either by dragging them or by running `osxphotos import /path/to/export/*`

Both the export and import commands have many other options for controlling export directory, etc. `osxphotos help export` or `osxphotos docs` to open docs in browser. (Disclaimer: I'm the author of osxphotos)

Check out exiftool.org

Locationator also comes with an optional CLI that can be used to perform reverse geocoding on images from the command line or perform the reverse geocoding and then write the location data to the file's XMP metadata using exiftool. It also comes with two services for doing the same from the Finder or other apps using the Services menu.

Edit: Nevermind, I got it. I used PyExifTool and installed exiftool from exiftool.org.

May not work as not all camera store the serial number in the EXIF, but if you've got exiftool installed you can try running:

I think TIFF has some unique features that makes it more prone to certain security issues[1] compared to other formats, such as storing absolute file offsets instead of relative offsets. So I am not sure TIFF is a good container format, but many camera raws are TIFF-based for some reason.[2]

[1] https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=libtiff

[2] https://exiftool.org/#supported (search for "TIFF-based")

I have struggled with this in the past, and I found the utility called exiftool quite useful.

> They don't offer an appropriate API to get photos out.

There's this: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/photokit "The framework provides access to photos on the person’s device and in iCloud."

If you want to use undocumented APIs on non-Apple devices directly, there are projects like https://github.com/steilerDev/icloud-photos-sync and https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do... that appear to be able to do this.

If you have iCloud, you can use icloud.com to get all your photos in a zip.

Or you can use scripts like this one : https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...

I use https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do... running on my NAS to regularly download photos from my wife's iCloud account. The photos are stored in full resolution on iCloud with the EXIF data, unlike Google Photos, so that's nice. The only annoyance is that you need to reauthorize the tool every three months. But it sends you a reminder when the time is coming up.

I keep my photos in iCloud and sync them up to a Synology NAS (using icloudpd) which is backed up to Backblaze B2.

Direct project link https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader

I was able to download 2 x 2TB (4TB) icloud photos accounts using this in 2 days if you are comfortable with the command line https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader There’s no other solution the mac app was very slow and was gonna takes weeks for me but this app downloaded everything in 2 days

A set of PowerShell scripts to download and organize iCloud media. The scripts use the awesome iCloud downloader from https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader to do the actual download. And the organization happens in a specific way…