imessage-exporter VS osxphotos

I don't think this works with more recent iMessage features, it looks like it only queries the `text` column [0], but newer (i.e. post MacOS 13) require reading and parsing the attributed_body column [1].

[0]: https://github.com/niftycode/imessage_reader/blob/master/ime...

[1]: https://github.com/ReagentX/imessage-exporter/blob/2dc3d034b...

Hey, this sounds like an interesting problem. I am always looking for edge cases to test, if you have time would you mind checking if https://github.com/ReagentX/imessage-exporter works for you and if it crashes in that spot?

I wrote a tool for this: https://github.com/ReagentX/imessage-exporter

If you are talking about data missing from the `text` column, for some reason it disappears after you read a message. The content is stored in a binary blob in a different column, which I parse like this: https://github.com/ReagentX/imessage-exporter/blob/c73bc4d66...

As someone who has moved between macOS+iOS and Windows/Linux+Android several times, this is doable. For technical people, it's just annoying. For non-technical people, this probably needs written into a more formal set of steps. If you have the need, one can setup your world to work on both systems transparently, but that takes more work.

Caveats: iOS messages can be kept, but they'll be in files, not your new message app. Photo edits will be lost unless you take extra steps.

Messages: if you are comfortable with it, use imessage-exporter (https://github.com/ReagentX/imessage-exporter) on your Mac to export your messages to disk. Copy to new machine. Validate you got what you wanted! Can also be used to decrease iCloud usage by backing up messages and deleting the originals from Apple Messages.

Photos: three ways. 1) open up the macOS photos app, select all photos, and export them. This will make any JPEG photos much larger than they originally were due to ridiculous default quality settings. 2) If you have access to a Windows machine, install iCloud for Windows, let the photos sync, and copy them to a new directory. 3) Use iCloud's web UI to download all the photos on the new machine.

Mail: pick a new provider. Several ways. 1) Add the new provider account to macOS mail. Copy and paste your emails/folders between accounts. 2) Create an app-specific password for iCloud, use the provider's migration facility (most major players support this and it will move your contacts and calendars).

Calendars: if you are sharing calendars with iOS users or will keep some Apple devices, keep iCloud as your primary calendar system. Use DavX5 (https://www.davx5.com/) on Android to setup a two-way mirror between your Android calendar app. Your email provider may provide calendar mirroring (Fastmail does, for one). If you aren't sharing / using your mail provider, export your calendars to ICS files from Apple Calendar and import into your new calendar app.

Contacts: if you will continue using Apple products, keep iCloud as your primary contacts system and use DavX5. Otherwise, open macOS Contacts, select all, and export to a VCF file. Import this into your new Contacts app.

Documents: copy to a backup drive from the machine, download them from iCloud on the web, use iCloud for Windows for the initial sync. Whatever suits you. If you are using Apple's office apps, be sure to load and save as a more universal format.

Since you have a Mac you can use this program: https://github.com/ReagentX/imessage-exporter

> 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.