Josh,
You might want to take a look at Plex. I haven’t used it for photos but as a media manager for TV, movies, and music files I think it’s far superior to the equivalent Apple programs, which I use strictly for copy protected media I’ve purchased from the iTunes store.
I would consider that a last resort.
About 500 GB worth.
Does current Lightroom still store photos in regular folders or does it do some weird library format? I read the documentation and that wasn’t clear.
I like Plex just fine, but it won’t help me get my photos out of the Apple Photos Library unless I’m missing something.
You can set up any folder structure you want in lightroom. Set up the folders IN lightroom. Lightroom itself does not store photos. It catalogues them wherever you have them or put them.
Ah, good to know! Maybe a Lightroom trial is the way to go.
Yep…10 bucks a month and you get full LR and PS for 2 computers at a time. Photos is pretty bare bones in comparison. Nice thing about LR is that everything it does is non destructive…essentially a series of recipes on how to edit the image but the displayed preview has the edits incorporated. When you export the shot they get applied to the output file. The only issue is that if you move files or rename folders or anything like that do it from within LR so it knows about the changes…or conversely you can do it in Finder and then right click/Synchronize folder in LR to get it to catch up. The images themselves are stored in regular old Finder hierarchy folders.
There are other options to LR that aren’t subscription…but neither ON1 or Luminar really have very good file management features…LR is still the standard.
Lightroom will oragnize them on input if you want, and follow any structure you assign. I have it store them in the way you describe, and it’s one of the reasons I haven’t moved off it, despite still using LR Classic.
FWIW, if you just want a one time extract from Photos, $10 for a month of LR might be worth it. If you’re looking for other options for longer term DAM/Editing features, there was a thread on here last year discussions LR alternatives (some of which were mentioned, eq CaptureOne).
I’m installing Lightroom now. Something to know: Adobe has made it so you can cancel your subscription online, but they charge you an early termination fee if you cancel before the end of year one. I’m hoping I can do my export within the trial period and avoid that.
So apparently Lightroom is absolutely useless for this. The current Lightroom will import from Apple Photos, but will only store your photos in your cloud, not on your local storage. Lightroom Classic will store photos locally, but can only import iPhoto or Aperture libraries, not Apple Photos libraries.
There’s apparently a hacky way to import with Lightroom and then export with Lightroom Classic, but I don’t want my photos in yet another cloud.
I’m getting pretty angry at these big tech companies trying to hold my data hostage.
Hi, longtime Lightroom Classic user here. Do you want to recover photos with edits intact or are you happy if I show you how to make Lightroom Classic find all your original photos and organise them in date based folders?
I don’t edit my photos much, so originals are fine.
What I’m actually experimenting with now is making smart folders of each year in Apple Photos and exporting the originals from the smart folder. So far, it’s an extremely slow process, but the photos are reasonably organized, Photos isn’t choking, and Synology Photos is picking up on the Live Photo.
So I figured out the trick: make an alias of the Photos library and Lightroom Classic can read that. I’m going to try a test import as soon as my CPU stops choking on 50,000 or so images.
To import from the whole Photos library might cause some duplicates. Here is my method.
On your mac, check that Photos.app setting has been Download Originals to this mac.
Go to your Photos Library in Finder. Right click it and choose “Show Package Content”. You will see several folders, the interesting one is the “Original” folder. Do “Get Info” on the “Original” folder to see if the file count seems right.
My recommendation is to test on duplicates first by copying some photos from “Original” to somewhere else.
Make a new catalog in Lightroom Classic. Drag the “Original” folder (or the test folder) into the main window in Lightroom Classic. Now you should see your photos coming in.
Start on the left and go right in the Import GUI.
Enable “Include Subfolders”
Choose between Copy or Move at the top. Move will empty your “Original” folder.
On the top right, choose the destination.
In the “File Handling” panel, choose Minimal.
Scroll down on the right to the Destination panel. Choose Organize By date. Check that you are happy with the structure. Click Import.
That’s essentially what I’m doing now, but thanks for documenting it so folks can see it.
It’s in progress now. It’s very slow and both Lightroom and the Synology are struggling, but it’s chugging along and seems faster than the Photos export.
The nice thing is I’m putting the Lightroom exports into their own subfolder in my photos directory, so if they’re screwed up I can delete the folder without it messing with the rest of the library. I have several duplicates already because I’ve tried a half-dozen different import methods. But it shouldn’t be hard to clean up since I’ve kept every method to its own folder. Yay for regular folders over monolithic libraries!
From your lips to God’s ears. 
:)
Josh: The RawPower app can export images from the Photo Library but can’t directly support the directory structure you want. Users have reported exporting 500 images at a time without problem. Nik says trying to do thousands of images at once would probably run out of memory.
David
I’m a bit late to this, but @jcenters the method @gastropod suggests is probably the most straightforward as you’re simply manipulating the files instead of getting some other application to do mysterious things. Two notes if you want to go down this route:
.photoslibrary bundle and then do Find (in the File menu) and select the ‘originals’ button in the Search: bar at the top of the window. Hold down option and click the … on the right of the search criteria. This will give you a search group which you can set to None of the following are true. Have one criteria underneath: Kind is Folder. This finds all files in all subfolders in the ‘originals’ folder. You can select them all and drag them to a new folder.The reason I recommend using Adobe Lightroom Classic is that it reads the metadata of the files and builds the folder structure in the Finder based on that. A good date based folder structure is the best long-term way to store photos.
Photos sometimes does fail to export when exporting large amounts of Photos. However this is mostly the case when you either use a Storage optimized iCloud Library or when you have set Photos to “Download originals to this Mac” but Photos has failed to do so. Photos can sometimes be a real pain when it comes to actually downloading all photos from iCloud.
So if you are about to export large amounts of photos or intend to use the originals folder in the Photos Library package then it is a good idea to verify that the amount of photos in the Photos application is about the same as in the folder structure in the originals folder.
To determine how many images/movies there are in the original´s folder you can use a simple terminal command:
find Pictures/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary/originals -type "f"|wc -l
If they are about the same then you can most likely export them. Sometimes you might need to export them in batches though if you have a really large library.
You could use the files in the originals folder instead of using the export feature in Photos but then you will have to live with having the photos named after Photos internal uuid:s. Of course, you could access the Photos database which is just a sqlite database and use the uuid:s from the filenames and extract the real filenames but exporting them is probably less work.
Then, when it comes to sorting the exported photos into date folders I assume that you want to sort on the Exif Creation date and if that is missing on the date of the file.
Personally I would use the free tool Exiftool for that:
exiftool -o . '-Directory<FileModifyDate' '-Directory<DateTimeOriginal' -d /path/to/destination/%Y/%m_%B/%Y.%m.%d -r /path/to/source/dir/
I exported a few photos from Lightroom and was pleased with the results, so I set it to export the entire library, which took all weekend. The result was a MESS. Duplicate and sometimes triplicate photos, broken Live Photos, photos out of order or assigned to the wrong year entirely. Just a mess.
So I’m going to delete that folder and the folders of all my failed experiments and export one year at a time, which is going to take forever because Photos export is passively-aggressively slow, but it’s the only reliable method I have found.
I am increasingly of the opinion that iCloud and Photos are both works of the devil.
I believe that moving all your iCloud photos into Google and then exporting them strips all the images of their valuable meta data.