Problem with import to Photos

[jasnw]

I am finally being forced to make the painful move from iPhoto to Photos and have run into a wall. I have a set of scripts that extract the original images from my iPhoto library, pull out location and other metadata from the library, and builds a by-decade directory setup with all images (photos and movies) and metadata files in it. I’ve got a test set of about 500 photos in this structure on an external SSD, and I loaded them into Photos by making a new Photos library location on the same SSD and then just drag-and-drop the top-level directory of the images into the open Photos session. I don’t want a second copy of these photos hidden away in a Photos-format database, so I imported this without copying the image files to the Photos library. All OK so far.

However, after over 12 hours of letting the app work on setting up things like places and people nothing is happening. It has found no people/faces, and the place map is devoid of anything. I forced the identification of some people in one image, and identified them in a second image, and Photos has grudgingly decided that it will display these when I click on People. It is still not finding new people or new instances of the people I identified manually. Also, while these two images will show up on a map if I look in People, the map under Places is still empty.

So, I have seen mention that if I don’t allow Photos to import the files into its library these capabilities are lost. Is this correct? Is there any way to force Photos to do what it’s advertised as being able to do?

 

[Ruggy]

So how good would you be at identifying people if you had only ever seen their face once? When they are looking to the side or down, when it's a bit blurry, when they are 10 years younger?
You are maybe, I don't know 10,000 times better at facial recognition than even the best AI on any computer but somehow they are expected to magically recognise Auntie May when she was a baby or looking over someone's shoiulder.
Don't mean to have a go but it's frustrating to read the same thing over and over....
Manually choose a few of different ages, in different light, half face, blurry, in bad light, in the back of a group and then have a moan if it doesn't find any.
Or, wait till the have the magic computers like they have on the CSI programs.

 

[jasnw]

Very poetic, very snide and dismissive, but not very useful. My complaint is not how good or bad the identification process works, it's that the process isn't even trying to work. I end up with a worse view of my photos after I move to Photos than I have on the now-depreciated iPhoto. The face finding and recognition on iPhoto isn't all that great, but it at least tried. And the location information is already embedded in the header information of the photos. No AI required. And THAT's not working. Looking for something other than ennui. If this is a solved problem, a simple link to a discussion of the solution will suffice.

 

[RhetTbull]

There are known problems with using a "referenced library" (what you're doing by keeping photos outside the Photos library). For example, see here. I suspect the issue is that either a bug (or feature, if by design) in Photos is keeping Photos from cataloging the photos on the external drive and that nothing you do will fix this short of allowing Photos to manage the files. At least in Catalina, external photos would never show on the Places map. I'm not sure about newer versions of MacOS nor if that's the problem with Faces but it seems likely. I use Photos to manage a large library but I've found it only works well if you let Photos manage the files. The biggest issue I know of with your approach is that, due to new security features introduced in Catalina, Photos uses what's called a "security scoped bookmark" to reference the location on the external SSD. That means that if you move those photos to another disk or move the drive to another computer, Photos will *not* be able to see those photos--the entire library will be broken. I like having a copy of my photos nicely organized on external drive as you do so my approach was to develop a tool to do this for me while still allowing Photos to organize the photos itself (and take advantage of iCloud for backup/syncing). The tool is called osxphotos and requires some level of comfort with the command line but works well for keeping an organized backup up to date.

If you really want to maintain your external folder organization, it might be better to look at another tool like Lightroom, etc.

 

[jasnw]

Thanks. In fact, I ran across your posts about osxphotos in another thread severak days ago and have installed it on my test system. This also forced me to learn more about python virtual environments, which is useful as well. Current plan is to convert all of my iPhoto libraries into Photos libraries and use osxphotos to build my external keeper libraries. I hope the problem Photos has handling metadata from referenced libraries is indeed a bug. Not that it will ever be fixed, but a feature like this is simply malicious.

 

[RhetTbull]

Thanks. In fact, I ran across your posts about osxphotos in another thread severak days ago and have installed it on my test system. This also forced me to learn more about python virtual environments, which is useful as well. Current plan is to convert all of my iPhoto libraries into Photos libraries and use osxphotos to build my external keeper libraries. I hope the problem Photos has handling metadata from referenced libraries is indeed a bug. Not that it will ever be fixed, but a feature like this is simply malicious.

> a feature like this is simply malicious

True, but it might be considered a "feature" if your intent is to keep people locked into the iCloud ecosystem and generate subscriber revenue.

I'm working on a new feature for osxphotos that will allow you to repair the broken bookmarks if you move the Photos library to a different disk. This won't help the metadata import issue though.

 

[jasnw]

And also thanks for developing this tool. I rolled my own python-based codes to pull files and meta information out of iPhoto libraries, but the switch to sqlite in Photos was more than I wanted to try to reverse-engineer.