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> 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)
Also added a feature to "hide" all elements that do not match the threshold.
https://github.com/seffignoz/icloudcleanup
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?
So yes, those 10TB archives may end up being 5TB if someone spent the time to really comb over, understand, make good decisions, and organize that data. But I have not yet seen anything that can scratch that surface yet, other than perhaps https://github.com/jjuliano/aifiles - but I won't use it until it's local only and has guarantees not to destroy data without explicit permission. An overlay filesystem that shows compression/deduplication with LLM capability like aifiles is probably the best option here.
However, I wouldn't imagine that most people's life data is less than 2TB even with all of this - it's mostly imposed as an artificial constraint by these companies.
> thought I cropped/edited a video, it is still there in full length and resolution
It's been possible to create a clip from a video file that merely changes what parts of the video are displayed without effecting the data in the original since the Classic Mac OS days.
If you want to completely remove unwanted portions of a video to reduce the size without a loss of quality, there are many options. LosslessCut is one option that is both free and open source.
https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut
AFAIK, it doesn’t support shared iCloud libraries but https://github.com/steilerDev/icloud-photos-sync does.
> 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)