osxphotos VS icloud_photos_do

> 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.

> 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.

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.

To avoid future data lose, you can backup all your icloud photos locally. Checkout icloud_photos_downloader[1], they have a docker container that is drop-dead simple to use. I run this[3] about once a month, I could probably automate it, but that feel like it'll take more time than it'll save[2].

[1] https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...

[2] https://xkcd.com/1319/

[3]

I have recently switched to a M1 Mac Mini, and just have each family member sign in to that using Remote Desktop. It brings the added bonus of working as a content cache for anything iCloud.

My only gripe is that it downloads the shared photo album (new in iOS 16) once for each account, and when your photo library is 1.8TB, that suddenly becomes a lot of wasted space. When it comes to backing it up the backup software deduplicates the data, but not for the initial storage.

I really wish Apple would implement some kind of method for backing up photos stored in the cloud without the need for mirroring them.

Before the M1 I was using iCloud photo downloader ( https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do... ) on a Raspberry Pi 4 which also worked well, but in the end I got tired of iCloud credentials expiring every ~90 days, requiring each family member to login again through a console.

Considering the M1 idles at roughly 20% more than a RPi4 (M1 at 4.5W) it was an easy sell. I just got the cheapest model and added a large USB drive. Using a Mac also gives you the possibility of using something like Backblaze Personal with unlimited backup storage, if that’s your thing :-)

- a hyperbackup task backs up the (encrypted) photos to Backblaze B2.

That way i have my photos in apple's cloud, on my nas and in another cloud.

What do I use to download/sync the photos from iCloud to the NAS, you ask?? It's an awesome project called "iCloud Photos Downloader" - https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...

I have it running in a docker container on the nas and it periodically syncs and keeps itself up to date, no hassle. https://hub.docker.com/r/boredazfcuk/icloudpd

icloud-photo-downloader: https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...

I've used this to great success! As far as I could tell, it grabbed every photo and video at the highest quality. Very happy.

I've been using icloud-photos-downloader[0] for a while now, running as a Scheduled Task on my Synology. It supports 2FA as well, I just have to re-auth every 3-4 months.

[0] : https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...