The Finder info pane tells me that I’d created my iPhoto Library back in 2007, there wasn’t a lot there but I had gone to the effort of creating albums and organising photos some years ago and left it at that. Time moved on and iPhoto was eventually discontinued, the migration path was meant to be to the Photos app which comes bundled with macOS as standard. I never made the switch to Photos, just like I didn’t switch to the Music app. Enter, Retroactive. Retroactive lets you install a bunch of unsupported applications on more recent versions of macOS, including iTunes and iPhoto. The process is fairly straightforward and in little time I had both applications running, I could see my old photos in iPhoto, and I left it there.
As things began winding down end of last year, I thought I should start organising my music collection and photos; so I fired up iPhoto and dragged a bunch of photos in, over 9000 to be exact. iPhoto started working through them and normally it would cycle through the images as it is importing them, but it didn’t do that this time.
Then the duplicate detection stepped in to ask what to do about a detected duplicate photo, again normally a thumbnail would be shown to help but just grey. I assumed that it was just graphics glitch because the photos show up fine in finder but when the import was finished, the copies of the photos in the iPhoto Library were sometimes plain black or white, so it looks like iPhoto had mangled the imported copies. The original source files were fine and viewable in Finder and Preview.
The images in the iPhoto Library are accessible via Finder, just right click / control click on the iPhoto Library and select Show Package Contents, there is a folder there called Masters with a folder structure reflecting what you see in iPhoto, I guess I could have just dragged that out and moved on to the new application I was going to use but what if there was information that would be lost because iPhoto stored it alongside those files. It certainly has the notion of revisions. Searching around, I found a now discontinued tool made by Google called Phoshare which allows you to export an Aperture or iPhoto library as a folder structure. The application is written in Python and makes use of Tk via Tkinter for GUI, the application for the Mac is a universal binary covering *both* PowerPC and 32-bit x86 which means it won’t run on Catalina or newer because support for 32-bit x86 binaries was dropped. Phoshare is open source and the subversion repo is still available but an odyssey into Python 2.x and getting all the relevant modules installed was going to be a faff. It would’ve been a good execuse to dust off a PowerBook but library was on a zpool and it was quicker just to import the zpool on an older MacBook Pro. 🙂
Phoshare requires Exiftool installed and it looks for it in /usr/bin which is disallowed on more recent versions of macOS so you will need to disable SIP and symlink from /usr/local/bin/exiftool to /usr/bin if you want to preserve metadata from your library.
Phoshare running on default setting will recreate the folder structure as you see within iPhoto in the location you stated to export the photos to, including a copy of the original photos in a subfolder if there are revisions of a photo e.g you used iPhoto to enhance them.
With my photos exported, I initially reached for darktable but soon realised that it does more than what I need, a simple photo manager to organise photos like Shotwell but cross-platform would be ideal whereas darktable seems more on processing capabilities and less on the file management side. Searching around it turned out that digikam is cross-platform and so I gave it a try and stuck with it. Over the past few weeks I have been trawling through disks finding and adding photos to my library which started out as the exported folder by Phoshare. digikam does duplicate detection which has made adding things a lot easier, just blindly add stuff, analyse, detect duplicates, clean up. There’s one interface behaviour which is slightly different in digikam if you’re coming from macOS / Gnome where if you’re drag and dropping things, on drop, it will show a menu asking you if you want to copy or move the items you’ve just dragged over. In a month of use it has only crashed on me once, otherwise it’s been great. I can now manage my photo library regardless of whether I’m on macOS or Linux using the same application. The folder structure on the file system is represented in digkam, which means you can organise things in your file manager of choice and that will be reflected in digikam (you have to scan for changes or it will pick up the changes the next time the application is started). digikam’s metadata is stored in files for sqlite (default option) or you have the choice to point it to an instance of mysql, .
Photos app does have an export feature for getting photos out but your photos are now stored in its own internal folder structure and information about your albums are stored and tracked in its own data files now. Having converted the iPhoto Library by opening it with Photos or organising things within Photos and trying to exporting that exact structure seemed to involve more fiddling than I was willing to commit to, I couldn’t get it working. Sticking with Photos wasn’t an options as it would tie me to macOS for managing photos. I never made the switch from iTunes to Music because it had a tendency to peg the CPU, even when open and not playing anything and they dropped support for iPod Classic which I still continue to use to this day as my music player. The workflow now is based on using Finder to sync a library with device whereas before I could add music to my device from any machine with iTunes.
I have yet to look for an iTunes replacement.