MacOS Photo Scripts

A growing collection of scripts meant to improve photo workflows on the mac and shine dim light on the mysteries of Photos.app.

Further explanation, discussion, and excuses offered in the blog posts associated with each tool and linked below.

photos2spotlight.py

Recent versions of Photos.app classify pictures into 1,000+ categories (4000+ if you include synonyms). photos2spotlight.py duplicates these category tags in filesystem metadata, where Spotlight can index them.

• Photo Metadata and Search on MacOS

alternative-classifiers.py

Builds a 2nd photos database with tags from 3rd-party image classifiers as well as the Photos.app database. Intended to facilitate easy comparisons of image classification services, and expanded xattr tagging (for spotlight search).

• Better Photo Search for MacOS with Clarifai

NOTE: Stopping Photolibraryd

In a perfect world, you could reliably stop photolibraryd with launchctl, but this is hit or miss in my experience.

[...]$ launchctl stop photolibraryd
[...]$ echo $?
3

And you'd be able to unload the photolibraryd service without disabling SIP.

[...]# launchctl unload  /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.photolibraryd.plist
/System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.photolibraryd.plist: Operation not permitted while System Integrity Protection is engage

But you cant't. Here is a dubious method for stopping photolibraryd, which is at least effective. Assumes $photodb is set to your photos.db

[...]$ chmod -w "$photodb"
[...]$ lsof "$photodb" | 
  awk '{ print $2}'    | 
  egrep -v PID         | 
  xargs kill

(Don't forget to restore write permissions when you're done!)