Photo Kit
The purpose is to struct and rename the photos exported by Apple Photos to have a consistent naming convention and well-organized folder structure. The results can be merged into a centralized folder via rsync, and that folder can be sync with cloud storage such as Amazon Drive for data backup.
Although Apple Photos is nice to manage photos, its photo management methodology and source code are not public. This has two drawbacks. First, it forces users to use iCloud to share photos, since 3rd parties such as Google Photo does not know how to read the photos. Second, it limits the scalability, since as the photo number increases, the disk storage won't be able to store all photos in a single Photos library, especially in the case of SSD. Users will inevitablly keep old photos in separate Photos libraries else where, such as external HD or NAS. However, browsing photos in different libraries is very inconvenient: users need to close Photos before open another library.
To solve the problem, the simplest solution is the old style folder-based management approach, such as below. Every 3rd party software understands this structure. Management is straight forward. Scalability is good.
./2015 ./20150523 ./20150922 ./2016 ./20160204 ./20161022
Although folder-based management is good, Apple Photos still has nice features that we wants to keep. My solution is to use Apple Photos to import photos in iDevice. When the size exceeds a threshold (e.g., 50GB), export photos in folder-based structure and rsync to a centralized storage in NAS. That centralized storage sync with Amazon Cloud Drive for backup.
Such methodology is good, but has a minor issue: the Subfolder format exported by Apple Photos has Chinese characters (2016年12月3日), which is not good for storage and data process convenience. The purpose of this kit is to convert the folder name and structure into formated ones categorized by year, as the above example.
No installation is required. However, python, bash, rsync are required.
Step 1: export photos using Apple Photos.
1. Select photos you want to export.
2. Click File > Export > Export Unmodified Original... to export photos to a
folder, e.g., /export_photo
Step 2: rename/restructure exported photos
1. change directory into the exported folder
$ cd /export_photo
2. call script to rename/restructure
$ ./rename_folder.py
The results will be stored in /export_photo/finish
Step 3: rsync the structured results into a centralized folder
1. One can reference rsync.sh to do this.
Please see the file called LICENSE.
Fu-Ching Yang fcyangesl@gmail.com