photos_time_warp VS elodie

I think the most likely thing that has happened in your case is that the data in the Photos.sqlite database file has been corrupted somehow--likely some kind of bug in Photos.app. So when Photos reports the date on a photo, it's retrieving that date from the database, not from the actual image file on disk. Thus, it's possible the date/time of the photos themselves is still preserved in the EXIF data of the original images. The Photos Time Warp tool has an option to read the date/time from the EXIF data and reset it in the Photos database to match. This tool requires a level of comfort with the command line so I wouldn't use it if you're not comfortable running commands in the Terminal but it is one option (the only one I know of) that might be able to restore the correct date/time for your affected photos by reading the data from the EXIF data of the original images.

elodie can do this and is very configurable.

It's not currently possible to use osxphotos with photos outside of the Photos.app nor is this a use case I plan to support. osxphotos is very tightly coupled to Photos.app. However, there are other apps that may help. For example elodie is another command line tool that automatically files photos using a customizable naming scheme. I'm the author of osxphotos and I have a similar app, autofile that, like elodie, can automatically file photos (and other file types) based on a customizable template (using the same template language as osxphotos). Unfortunately autofile currently only runs on MacOS but I am working on a re-write that will allow it to run on Windows and Linux. For your use case I think elodie is probably the best option at the moment.

I have an 8 year old app that reminds me a lot of this article.

Something that's worked really well for me was that I created a plugin feature and most new features are actually plugins. This lets me add capabilities without touching or adding logic to the core code.

Last night I added SQLite support as a plugin. 2 code files and one is unit tests. https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/pull/443/files

I don't know if this is the best approach but it's worked better than others in my 20+ years of writing software.

I stopped using Google Photos in favor of Synology Photos which comes pretty close in terms of functionality and polish.

Google Photos is excellent.

Synology Photos is really good. And this seems to be a worthwhile tradeoff for me.

Disclaimer: I founded 2 photo startups and have documented the solution I've finally landed on and have been using/evolving for 7 years now.

1. https://github.com/jmathai/elodie

2. https://medium.com/@jmathai/understanding-my-need-for-an-aut...

3. https://medium.com/@jmathai/introducing-elodie-your-personal...

4. https://medium.com/@jmathai/my-automated-photo-workflow-usin...

5. https://medium.com/@jmathai/one-year-of-using-an-automated-p...

I wrote this tool to normalize folder and file names <https://github.com/jmathai/elodie>.

I wrote about the rest of the system in the following posts.

1. https://medium.com/@jmathai/introducing-elodie-your-personal...

2. https://medium.com/@jmathai/understanding-my-need-for-an-aut...

3. https://medium.com/@jmathai/my-automated-photo-workflow-usin...

4. https://medium.com/@jmathai/one-year-of-using-an-automated-p...

Check out https://github.com/jmathai/elodie

Elodie - cli; automatically organizes based on exif data

I've been using this fully automated system for the last 5 years.

I store my photo archive on a Synology NAS at home which Syncs to Dropbox and uploads a copy of each photo to Google Photos for browsing and sharing. I'm hoping to switch to Backblaze, from Dropbox, once Synology Photos is available and drop Google Photos as well.

I've documented the entire process and include source code on Github.

Auto organize based on EXIF: https://github.com/jmathai/elodie

Series of posts on Medium: