iPhoto Mess

As I have said already, I am trying to get control of my photo collection. I want to have an image on almost every blog post, but before I can do that I need to sort out the mess that is my collection. Currently I have raws and jpegs in a directory structure, an iPhoto library and some almost structure files.

I want to have the directory layout:

year/month/day/[raw|jpeg]

For today it would be:

2016/11/11/raw
2016/11/11/jpeg

Before I can do that I need to extract images from iPhoto and collate everything together. Unfortunately iPhoto on my laptop does not want to start up at all and I suspect the App Store will want me to upgrade my OS too. I am a hacker so this isn't a problem.

Some searching turned up exportiphoto a python program that will extract images from your iPhoto library. Download, run:

python exportiphoto.py [options] "iPhoto-Library-dir" "destination-dir"

Running this script there was some crunching, some promising output and then it was done super fast, awesome! I sshfs ed out to the storage box and started looking around for my photos. Instead I found a bunch of empty directories, I must have done something wrong.

Instead of poking at the script I thought I would have a look at the iPhoto app bundle. Apps on a back are made up of a bundle, the bundle is just a directory which the finder treats in a special way. Looking into the bundle I found a Masters directory. The Masters directory was 40GB of photos in a raw format, most of the pictures that will be in the library.

The Masters directory has the photos stored in the correct directory structure, so I copied that out to use as the basis for my tidy.

Reading: Abaddon's Gate, Reamde