exiftool VS osxphotos

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.

> 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)

See the issue tracker if you want to follow along. Hopefully this is an easy fix and I can push a patch today.

In response to a question on the osxphotos GitHub Discussions page, I wrote a quick script to do prune empty albums and folders from Photos that can be run with osxphotos (version 0.65.0 and later). You can run the script directly from GitHub without downloading it first via:

You could try opening the library with PowerPhotos, a commercial app that can manage multiple Photos libraries, to see if it can read it. You could also try my free open source command line tool, osxphotos. Install it then run this command in the Terminal: osxphotos info --library /path/to/the/library This should print out a list of information about the library: number of photos, number of albums, keywords in the library, etc. If that works, then osxphotos can read the library and can likely export the photos for you so you could re-import into a new library.

I'm the author of the osxphotos[0] tool mentioned in the article. For photos in an Apple Photos library, osxphotos gives you access to a rich set of metadata beyond what's in the actual EXIF/IPTC/XMP of the image. Apple performs object classification and other AI techniques on your images but generally doesn't expose this to the user. For example, photos are categorized as to object in them (dog, cat, breed of dog, etc.), rich reverse geolocation info (neighborhood, landmarks, etc.) and an interesting set of scores such as "overall aesthetic", "pleasant camera tilt", "harmonious colors", etc. These can be queried using osxphotos, either from the command line, or in your own python code. (Ref API docs[1])

For example, to find your "best" photos based on overall aesthetic score and add them to the album "Best Photos" you could run:

osxphotos query --query-eval "photo.score.overall > 0.8" --add-to-album "Best Photos"

To find good photos with trees in them you could try something like:

osxphotos query --query-eval "photo.score.overall > 0.5" --label Tree --add-to-album "Good Tree Photos"

There's quite a bit of other interesting data in Photos that you can explore with osxphotos. Run `osxphotos inspect` and it will show you all the metadata for whichever photo is currently selected in the Photos app.

[0] https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos

osxphotos is my own tool for power users to interact with Photos from the command line: export, batch edit, sync metadata, import, etc.

osxphotos v0.60.8 adds initial alpha support for macOS Sonoma (macOS 14.0.0 / Photos 9.0). Everything seems to be working but if you are beta testing Sonoma and use osxphotos I'd welcome any feedback you have!

I'm the author of the free/open source tool osxphotos which provides several utilities fo working with Photos and exporting your photos. You can use the batch-edit feature to automatically add the album name as a keyword and I believe keywords are shared across users. (I don't use shared libraries so can't confirm this). I am working on a feature to then automatically re-create the albums from the keywords on the target library. For now the keywords is a partial work around.

If you want to edit batch metadata of photos that are in the Apple Photos app on a Mac, I'm the author of a free tool, osxphotos that includes a batch-edit command that will edit the metadata in the Photos library.