Of Photos, Aperture, and Sliding Between Volumes

Over the years I have used Aperture, Picasa and the Apple Photos Apps. In that time they have organised my files chronologically, automatically, as soon as I took pictures, in some cases.

What They Do

Aperture was well behaved. It would organise photos by year, by month and by day, so it’s easy to migrate a library from drive A to drive B. Apple Photos on the other hand makes a pig’s breakfast. It renames the files with a chaotically huge number, and then moves files into folders from 0-9 and then from A to F or some similar chaotic mess.

The Issue.

If you want to migrate an aperture or Photos library from one volume to another it will take hours, despite there not that being much data. That’s because Aperture and Photos create preview files of different sizes, caches and plenty of other files. The result is that you’re not moving x number of photos and one or two json files with the appropriate metadata. You’re moving 200,000 files within that library folder.

The 500 Gigabytes of photos that you want to move, and that would take up to five hours to move, if they were just photos in folders then take 24 hours or more.

The Cause

There are two principle reasons for this collection of aperture libraries. The first is that for a while I had a mac book air for daily use, and a mac book pro for video editing. As a result I had two libraries simultaneoulsy. The second reason is that I would backup the laptop to external hard drives every so often, and in doing so I would have several versions of my photo libraries.

Time machine is also partially responsible because it creates multiple copies so you need to reconcile the differences between versions, to avoid losing files that are not backed up.

The Solution

If you have aperture libraries that have not been converted to Apple Photos folder structure then you’re in luck. In my case I opened up each library and moved the folders containers from within the package to an external folder structure where I kept the chronological organisation. I methodically worked my way through several years of photos within half an hour to an hour, and then told Finder to move the files from Drive A to Drive B. It told me “about one hour remaining” so I took the time to write this blog post.

In the Mean Time

One of the funniest things I have noticed, while playing with my video and photo archives is that I have not seen some people that I have forgotten many of their names. It is for this reason that I need to keep at least one Photos photo library, until I have renamed faces that are recognised on Immich, or PhotoPrism, before deciding what to do with the old Photos libraries.

The Next Stage

Out of curiousity I tested to see whether I could import the experimental photo folder structure into photos and I saw that I can, and that duplicate detection works.

Combining Old and New

At the moment I have three photo libraries. I have the Google Photos and mobile phone based on on PhotoPrism. The next photo library is the one that I got out of extracting photo galleries from Aperture and Apple Photos. The final library is the one that is based on the files and folders that I have from storing files manually, outside of Photo management apps.

The next step is to clear a four terabyte drive. It will be dedicated to photos and audio books. PhotoPrism will take care of the photos, and AudioBookShelf will take care of the books.

Why I Chose Four Terabytes

I want room to expand. When experimenting with one terabyte I found that my photo library immediately fills the entire drive and when I tried with two terabytes I feel that with audio books I will be tight on space. With four terabytes I can have one terabyte for photos, one terabyte for books, and two terabytes for the libraries to grow, without having to swap the drives.

The other reason is easy backup. I plan to free storage space on at least two four terabyte drives with the newest being the primary drive and the older one being a backup. If one fails the second one will take its place.

The final reason is price. Four terabyte drives have the best price. They’re cheaper than smaller and larger drives per terabyte.

And Finally

In the past we would go out, take photos and video and when we got home we woulc create a folder with the name of the activity. Over time we would have plenty of folders but everything was organised, by default.

In the modern era our phones and cameras do all of this for us. They add the date, the location and more automatically so we don’t organise anything ourselves. The result is hundreds of folders organised by year, month and day, but without any further information. That chaos makes it so that we need Photos, PhotoPrism and other solutions. They “organise” our files.

Conclusion

Photos, by Apple, and other apps ingest our images and organise them out of sight, which is great when we’re using their apps, but awful when we’re trying to use another software solution. It makes sense to have a drive with two folders. Photos and videos, with everything organised by year, month, day and project or activity name.

In so doing we can see in the finder, which files are duplicates, or missing, within seconds. We need to organise our files, and software should just help us look through our archives.