Migrating to Lightroom Classic from Apple Photos

17 thoughts on “Migrating to Lightroom Classic from Apple Photos”

1. Thank you for sharing this information, Rob! I ran your KeywordAlbum.applescript on my Photos library consisting of 23 819 images across 307 albums. It worked like a charm, even with Norwegian letters and special characters in file- and album names. Zero errors. I have a mixture of RAW + JPEG and PNGs from different cameras, including Nikon, Canon and Leica. You really saved me a lot of hassle.

2. Your fine work here will save me countless hours as I recover two corrupted very large (220 gigs & 410 gigs) old iPhoto libraries from a Synology NAS I used to archive my brothers iMacs data before one of them had an unrecoverable hard drive failure. The iMacs were both acting badly a couple months before the ultimate failure, which prompted me to buy his family a small NAS and do an archive backup during a family visit. My brother is a fine photographer, but rather busy as a primary care doc attending to his patients on the frontlines of CV-19 pandemic in Boston, so I wanted to take on this task for him.

   After much work I have recovered and converted his old iPhoto libraries to newer Photos versions and with your guide and tools will now work to migrate them into Lightroom Classic. Everything is now backed up onto multiple drives on my collection of NAS's. Will be using a vanilla install i9-9900 cpu Hackintosh I built to process the Photos –> Lightroom migration, otherwise my old mid-2010 MBP would find the task a bit daunting.

   Thank-you again for developing this workflow. Best regards.

   — stay safe.
   — mark in Seattle

3. Your KeywordAlbum.applescript worked pretty well on my first test of an Apple PhotosLibrary. It added the expected keywords: PhotosExport>some-album-name, to the jpeg files. It ignored photos and albums inside PhotoLibrary folders, so I repeated the process with a fresh copy of the test PhotosLibrary, this time moving all the Albums into the same root level of Photos –> Albums.

   One question if I may: when I leveled the Album structure, and even before doing so, multiple Albums can point to the same original jpeg photo file. So not unexpectedly KeywordAlbum.applescript iterating over all the Albums sometimes created multiple keyword entries inside a jpeg file:

   a JPEG photo file:
   Keywords:
   PhotosExport>some-album-name
   PhotosExport>another-album-name

   Was wondering how the Adobe Lightroom Classic plugin code will deal with multiple "PhotosExport>" keywords. If it stores a copy of the JPEG file inside a hard drive folder with the same name as the original Apple Photos Album name then that would be workable, even better … maybe if it stores the JPEG in the hard drive folder created first and any other "PhotosExport>" keywords associated with the JPEG file get a symbolic reference … or the Lightroom Classic equivalent placed inside the second Lightroom folder.

   Took some effort to prevent Apple Photos from processing all the previous Photo Libraries it knew about, when I really only wanted it the KeywordAlbum.applescript to process only my test Photo Library. No harm was done, because I stopped the script before it could do that. My assumption was the script would only process the Apple Photos "system library" which my test PhotosLibrary was designated as. Not clear how Apple intends a user to remove PhotoLibrarys from it's list of available libraries, so I disconnected the internal hard drive holding the non-test libraries, leaving only the test Library visible to the system.

   Thank-you once again for providing your applescript and LR plugin.

4. Many thanks for your tutorial. Have been diligently following your instructions but got stuck when running the plugin. The message says "No Key Words under "_Keywords To Become Collections" to be converted into collections"

   Presumably the message above is what you referenced in your note (which I have copied below).

   QUOTE
   If the "_KeywordsToBecomeCollections" keyword has been created by the plug-in or is empty, then a message will be displayed and the process will stop. You now need to place the keyword hierarchy that you wish to be converted to collections within collection setsinside this keyword and Create Collections run again.
   UNQUOTE

   Would appreciate if you could explain what you mean by "You now need to place the keyword hierarchy ….. and Create Collections run again".

   1. Winston,

      The Apple script creates keywords that start with PhotosExport>, so when they end up in Lightroom Classic, you see a hierarchy of keywords under PhotosExport.

      The Creation-Creator Plugin doesn't look there though. It looks for keywords that are children of the top level _KeywordsToBecomeCollections keyword.

      Therefore, you need to drag the keywords under the PhotosExport keyword into the _KeywordsToBecomeCollections keyword and then it will create collections for you when you run the "Create Collection" menu command.

5. Hi Rob! I've just come across your script here. I've left it running over night and at the end (in the results section) it says 'Result: false'. Not sure if that is a problem or expected?

   I also noticed that not all photos within albums have been tagged with keywords by the script. Initially i thought it was because the albums are in more deeply nested folders and the settings you gave the script tell it to not look so deeply but I'm not sure now as 'Mark Early' seemed to have a similar problem too. Is it a problem with the apple Photos app and not your script? and is there a workaround/adjustment to the script you could offer me to make it keyword every photo within an album no matter how deeply nested it is please? by the way im not good at all with all of this programming so if there is a change in the script you could post in your reply so i can copy and paste instead telling me pointers on how to modify the script myself I would be really grateful

   PS – I live about 30 minutes away from you! lol

   1. Steve, I can't think why it doesn't keyword for all nest levels. How deep is it failing for you?

      1. literally every folder and album that is not at the root level. I'm using catalina if that makes a difference? i read somewhere that photos app changes how it operates within the newest versions (4 and 5?) and you have to tell it to look within folders instead of albums i think. if i find the web page i saw it on ill link it to you. i have also come across another script on github (https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos) but it may as well be in another language as i am terrible at programming so don't know what I'm doing with it lol

         1. Also not a coder so this could be off but I'm pretty sure the problem is line 32 "set allAlbums to albums" is only capturing top level albums.

            I think this post explains what is going on (https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/653467) but because my programing level is probably worse than Steve's I haven't yet figure out how to get allAlbums to include all the nested album names. It looks like you need to build all the recursive loops.

            1. Thanks. I wonder if it's a recent change. I was probably on Mojave when I wrote it.

            2. Further reading shows that it changed with Catalina. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251624739 has the details.

               The script will need re-working.

         2. Hi. I'm the author of the osxphotos app you mentioned (https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos). You can get pretty close to your use case with this one command:

            osxphotos export /path/to/export --sidecar xmp --keyword-template "PhotosExport>{folder_album(>)}" --keyword-template "{edited?edited-before-lightroom,}" --exiftool

            Breakdown of the command:
            export /path/to/export = where to send the files

            --sidecar xmp = export XMP sidecar files with associated metadata (will also include faces/persons which Photos won't export)

            --keyword-template "PhotosExport>{folder_album(>)}" = add the keyword you wanted with folder/album path. {folder_album(>)} is a command in osxphotos' own template language which means "add a keyword based on folder and album path and use > as the path separator"

            --keyword-template "{edited?edited-before-lightroom,}" = add a keyword of 'edited-before-lightroom' if the photo has been edited otherwise don't add a keyword

            --exiftool = run exiftool to export all metadata to the exported files (requires exiftool be installed: https://exiftool.org/)

            If you shot RAW+JPEG, this would give you both the RAW and JPEG images as there's currently no way to filter just the RAW of the RAW+JPEG pair (though you can filter out just the JPEG part). I'll open a new issue for this as it would be useful.

            1. Thanks Rhet,

               This is really useful.

         3. Also, I forgot to mention that with osxphotos you can re-run this command in the future by adding the –update option which will export only those images which have changed or been added in Photos or changed in the destination.

            osxphotos export ~/Desktop/export --sidecar xmp --keyword-template "PhotosExport>{folder_album(>)}" --keyword-template "{edited?edited-before-lightroom,}" --exiftool --skip-original-if-edited --update

6. First, Rob. I didn't thank you in your last post for this article. It made me think long and hard before the migration process. So thank you.

   Back to this. Jamming the code from the apple link you posted into the script does successfully capture all the albums. But in the whack a mole world of software, now down in lines 103-107 for some reason attempting to set targetObject to the parent folder results in an error which stops the repeat loop.

   So the script will now process all albums but only one nested folder layer down.

   I tried several different ways to assign a folder object to any variable and it seems like it always results in an error. I'll keep looking around a bit but it might be that Apple has moved on from supporting this.

   Thanks for posting your work though,
   -Russell

   1. I ended up brute forcing the problem. Here's the ugly code that only works for 4 or fewer nested levels of folders. I know – that's not the way to write software but it worked for me and I was too tired to solve it correctly.

      on getAlbumKeyword(targetObject)	
      	-- start with the album name
      	set theKeword to the name of targetObject
      	
      	tell application "Photos"
      		try
      			if class of parent of targetObject is folder then
      				set theKeword to name of parent of targetObject & ">" & theKeword
      				if class of parent of parent of targetObject is folder then
      					set the theKeword to name of parent of parent of targetObject & ">" & theKeword
      					if class of parent of parent of parent of targetObject is folder then
      						set the theKeword to name of parent of parent of parent of targetObject & ">" & theKeword
      						if class of parent of parent of parent of parent of targetObject is folder then
      							set theKeword to name of parent of parent of parent of parent of targetObject & ">" & the Keword
      							my logThis("You were WRONG there are Albums nested 4 deep")
      						end if
      					end if
      				end if
      			end if
      		end try
      	end tell
      	set theKeword to "ExistingAlbum>" & theKeword
      	return theKeword
      end getAlbumKeyword
      

7. Hi Rob,
   Did you ever manage to 'repair' your script so that it operated on all levels of folders (recursively). I'm about to finally export my whole library to my NAS and I am willing to depend on your script as opposed to having to figure out how to utilise Rhets osxphotos script

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