How to export originals from Photos app without killing my machine?

[EugW]

I'm trying to export all of my original unmodified pix from my Photos library but Photos then does this:

Photos has pegged one core at 100% for the past hour now, which I guess means it can't make use of multiple cores for this thread. However, over the course of that hour it has consumed more than 100 GB of memory! Why is it doing this? All it needs to do is copy the original photos out of the directories to an external drive. The pix do not need to be processed in any way.

Should I kill the process and start over, just outputting a portion of the pix at a time?

 

[EugW]

Should I kill the process and start over, just outputting a portion of the pix at a time?

Well I guess I will have to. Photos just crashed. BTW, as you can see, it was running for over an hour before it crashed.

The good news is I got my 80 GB of swap back.

 

[EugW]

Third party apps will do this export but some charge an arm and a leg for this functionality, despite the fact it's supposed to be included for free in Photos.

Anyhow, it turns out if I limit the exports to much smaller batches, it works fine, with reasonable memory usage. I'm thinking the crazy memory usage above must be from a leak somewhere.

 

[organicCPU]

Many times I had to wait several days for exporting a large iPhoto or Photos library with built-in functionality. That the app gets unresponsive during export was quite usual.

Sometimes it´s better to locate the photos library and grab the images directly from there. The standard location is ~/pictures/Photo Library.photoslibrary. Right click (or Ctrl + click) on it and select "Show package contents…" from the contextual menu. From there you should find your images that you can drag´n´drop to whatever location.

More comfortable could be a Command Line Tool called osxphotos that I didn't test so far:

GitHub - RhetTbull/osxphotos: Python app to work with pictures and associated metadata from Apple Photos on macOS. Also includes a package to provide programmatic access to the Photos library, pictures, and metadata.

Python app to work with pictures and associated metadata from Apple Photos on macOS. Also includes a package to provide programmatic access to the Photos library, pictures, and metadata. - GitHub ...

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