OSX "Photos" application is unusable



  • A family member recently decided to upgrade from her old, broken, Windows Vista laptop to a brand new (and expensive) Macbook Pro, and I agreed to help her migrate her stuff.

    She had 50GB of photos in her laptop (which had an 80GB HDD), organized in folders with appropriate names (e.g. "trip to Egypt 2006"), which AFAIK is how most people organize their photos. I set up an rsync server on the Windows machine and copied them to the new computer (I don't trust other network transfer tools). No big WTFs until here (only a long list of minor ones that I'm too lazy to write up), everything seemed to work.

    Then I saw an icon on the launch bar: "Photos". Well, alright, now that the files are here, we can give the photo manager a try. I open the app, choose the "Import" option from the menu, navigate to the folder containing the 50GB of data and let the thing churn for 30 minutes.

    It worked flawlessly, except for one small detail: It ignored the folder structure and lumped all the photos in one "album".

    After further investigation, I concluded: Apple's "brand new" photo managing app simply cannot import folders into albums. So if you have a large, manually organized photo library, you're fucked. I suppose it's their way of punishing people for having ever owned a non-Apple device.

    Furthermore, being Apple, it stores all photos in an internal database in a proprietary format, and there's no clear indication that you can even get your original files back (again, why would you ever do that, just let MomCorp take care of your data forever). That pile of excrement is basically an interface for their iCloud photo storage, which has a measly 5GB of space in the free plan so we're not using .


  • FoxDev

    ITunes has done that for ages.

    sure you can select a button to make it stop moving your files around to match it's idea of how they should be organized, but it forgets you checked that box every time you open it....



  • Apple shit did this even before I stopped using it (around when 10.4 came out). Yet one more reason Apple products are shitty trash crap.



  • @anonymous234 said:

    I set up an rsync server... (I don't trust other network transfer tools).

    Nutjob alert.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @anonymous234 said:

    I set up an rsync server on the Windows machine

    It's unrelated to Photos and its fuckery but Windows and Mac can talk natively.



  • Well to be honest, I used standard SMB to transfer at first, but the connection kept failing for mysterious reasons (probably my WiFi router being stupid).

    What happens when the network connection fails while you're transmitting 50GB of data? You get an incomplete folder, and you don't know which one. So the only way to resume is to copy the folder again and tell it to not overwrite files. Being unfamiliar with OSX, I couldn't even be sure that it didn't leave a partially corrupted file. I had to be absolutely sure that no data was lost in the process. And OSX was adding its own invisible files somewhere, so I couldn't use the right click -> folder properties and compare size in bytes method. And there was literally no downside to using a program specifically designed for the task at hand that was already in the Mac. So in conclusion, fuck you.



  • @accalia said:

    ITunes has done that for ages.

    sure you can select a button to make it stop moving your files around to match it's idea of how they should be organized, but it forgets you checked that box every time you open it....

    It's one of the reasons why I don't use the libraries function of any music player.


  • FoxDev

    @powerlord said:

    It's one of the reasons why I don't use the libraries function of any music player.

    regardless of wether you do or dont use the libraries function if you use itunes it'll do this to your music. because FXXXX you!

    at least it doesn't obfuscate the file names or any such shite like it does on ipods to make it "impossible" to extract your "unlicensed" music from the flash rom....


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @powerlord said:

    It's one of the reasons why I don't use the libraries function of any music player.

    iTunes does a decent job of organising my music collection, so I leave it to it.
    Or I did - I've not used my iPod since I last changed car nearly 18 months ago, and use Spotify now.


  • FoxDev

    @powerlord said:

    It's one of the reasons why I don't use the libraries function of any music player.

    I use Winamp's Media Library quite a bit. But then it leaves my files well the fuck alone 😄



  • Overly defensive nutjob alert.



  • @Bort said:

    Nutjob alert.

    Ehh, what? Rsync's one of the best tools for the job -- a simple remote mount isn't smart enough to deal with partial transfers, retries, etal smoothly.



  • @tarunik said:

    Rsync's one of the best tools for the job

    I don't disagree - it was the phrasing "...I don't trust other [whatevers]...".

    Such manner of writing usually indicates that someone is a nutjob in my experience. Or perhaps a snob.



  • Pendrives, dammit.

    Also, I think that's just the usual Apple shtick - they're decent at managing your data only as long as they can take it over completely. That's what most Mac /iThings users are happy with, though.


    Filed under: for varying definitions of "decent"



  • @anonymous234 said:

    Furthermore, being Apple, it stores all photos in an internal database in a proprietary format, and there's no clear indication that you can even get your original files back

    That's easily solved. Look for the "Photos Library" in Pictures (note that it might have a different name if your language isn't set to English; it's probably the biggest file in that directory), right click (or control-click) and choose the third item from the pop-up menu, which in English reads: "Show Package Contents". Now you'll see a directory, and your original pictures are in Masters (I don't know what happens to the edited versions)


  • kills Dumbledore

    Is "Photos" a replacement for iPhoto, or a shit free tool to convince you to spend money on iSomeShitOrOther where you can use such new and magical devices as folders?



  • As far as I understand, Photos is the new all-inclusive photos app for Apple ecosystem. The idea is to keep your shit on their cloud thing and sync only what you want at the moment to various computers or mobile devices.

    That's if you trust Apple not to fuck up your shit (not) and to give you a way out if you ever want to pack up and move to the competition (definitely not).


  • kills Dumbledore

    And not to lose your naked pictures of Jennifer Lawrence



  • @Jaloopa said:

    And not to lose your naked pictures of Jennifer Lawrence

    I wouldn't worry too much about those. The Internet, in its wisdom, has deemed these files important enough on which to implement several layers of RAID.


  • BINNED

    INB4 "RAID is not backup!"



  • @anonymous234 said:

    She had 50GB of photos in her laptop (which had an 80GB HDD), organized in folders with appropriate names (e.g. "trip to Egypt 2006"), which AFAIK is how most people organize their photos.

    Doesn’t mean it’s the smart way. With 50 GB of photos, having a program that lets you filter your photos seems the better choice to me …

    @anonymous234 said:

    I set up an rsync server on the Windows machine and copied them to the new computer (I don't trust other network transfer tools).

    Um … you could just have shared a folder on the Windows computer on the local network, then used the Finder on the Mac to get to it. OS X uses SMB2 by default these days, so talking to Windows isn’t a problem (and hasn’t been for a decade at least).

    @anonymous234 said:

    After further investigation, I concluded: Apple's "brand new" photo managing app simply cannot import folders into albums.

    Not making apologies, but I think this is because of the way the app is intended: you can see all your photos, and sort of zoom in and out on them in various ways, like sorted by location, by date, and so on. This does depend on having photos with that kind of metadata correctly in them, yes. You can still create albums (dumb and smart ones) manually from the File menu.

    @anonymous234 said:

    Furthermore, being Apple, it stores all photos in an internal database in a proprietary format

    A folder with subfolders and some metadata, little more than that.

    @anonymous234 said:

    and there's no clear indication that you can even get your original files back

    You mean like this?

    Or you could navigate to the Pictures folder, right-click on the Photos library and choose “Show package contents” if you prefer a hands-on method.


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