iPhotoExtractor

Copies pictures from an iPhoto library into a directory structure based on iPhoto events. For example:

.
├── Christmas
│   ├── IMG_0001.JPG
│   ├── IMG_0002.JPG
│   ├── IMG_0003.JPG
│   └── Originals
│       └── IMG_0002.JPG
└── New Year's
    ├── IMG_0004.JPG
    └── IMG_0005.JPG

If a photo was modified by iPhoto, the modified version will appear in the main event directory and the original version will be copied to an Originals subdirectory.

This was inspired by gaetronik/iPhotoShotwell and fasaxc/shotwell-iphoto-import, but differs in two respects:

Both scripts target the Linux-only Shotwell photo manager, whereas this produces a platform-independent directory tree; and
Both scripts obtain album data from the AlbumData.xml file, whereas this reads the SqEvents table from iPhotoMain.db. This was important in my case, because the events had been used as albums and the actual albums were uselessly broad things like "Photos," "Last Import," etc.

Requirements

Install the .NET Core SDK (2.0 or newer) for your platform.

Usage

Clone the repo and run like so:

git clone https://github.com/rdnlsmith/iPhotoExtractor.git
cd iPhotoExtractor
dotnet run extract '/path/to/iPhoto Library' '/path/to/output'

The output folder does not need to exist beforehand. In fact, it will display a warning if you do specify an existing directory.

If you want to see what the final directory structure will look like without actually copying any files, run

dotnet run preview '/path/to/iPhoto Library' '/path/to/output'

Limitations

This program has only been tested with one iPhoto library, and I don't know what version of iPhoto produced it.

This program ought to work on any platform supporting .NET Core, but it has only been tested on Ubuntu 18.04.

The output of the preview command is not guaranteed to be entirely correct, as the extract command will append e. g. (2) to a file name if a file by that name already exists. This may occur since some of the modified photos in my library had multiple file paths.

The extract command copies every photo, which means you need enough free disk space to duplicate your library. I might consider adding a --destructive flag to move photos instead of copying them.

This program has already served its purpose, and I don't have any more iPhoto libraries to test it on, so I'm not likely to make further improvements for myself. If you use this program and run into problems, please open an issue and I will try to help.

Acknowledgements

The command-parsing structure was shamelessly stolen from these two very helpful articles by Marcel Samyn.