Osxphotos Alternatives

osxphotos reviews and mentions

• Apple, What Have You Done?
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jan 2026

  > What’s the point of using application databases if the application cannot even query items by size and other attributes?!

  I know that's not the solution that we want, but at least you should be able to look into the sqlite database it's using under the hood (https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos/wiki/Understanding-th...)

• iCloud Photos Downloader
  12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Jan 2026

  It does. It uses PhotoKit to access photos, so it basically uses your Apple Photos app (iOS or Mac) to download the photos.

  The only scripted solution I can think of that works with ADP is osxphotos[^1], but that also uses PhotoKit, and requires the user to be signed in.

  Personally I use PhotoSync [^2] to backup our photos from phones to a NAS. It works reliably, and supports exporting unmodified originals as well as edited versions, and XMP/AAE metadata alongside it.

  ^1: https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos

  ^2: https://www.photosync-app.com/home

• Apple Photos App Corrupts Images
  7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Sep 2025

  You can put your apple photos library on an external / network attached drive. Thats what I do, since my photo library has grown to ~300gb. And I'd much rather buy a hard drive than rent one from apple.

  There's also the excellent osxphotos utility which can export / backup / migrate photos in and out of apple photos:

  https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos

• Protobuffers Are Wrong
  17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Sep 2025
• Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript
  8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Jan 2024

  > 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)

• pipx install osxphotos fails
  1 project | /r/osxphotos | 10 Dec 2023

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

• Delete empty albums
  1 project | /r/osxphotos | 7 Dec 2023

  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:

• Library backup
  1 project | /r/ApplePhotos | 5 Dec 2023

  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.

• Exploring EXIF
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Sep 2023

  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

• Third Party Apps that work with Apple Photos Library
  1 project | /r/ApplePhotos | 27 Aug 2023

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

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