It's macOS-only and intentionally minimal — the goal is just to download originals from iCloud Photos to disk without syncing everything into Photos.app first.
To be clear on limitations: it doesn't preserve albums or other metadata yet, and it's not meant to replace more full-featured tools. It’s mainly for the "I just want my photos off iCloud for backup" case.
Reading the comments here, it sounds like metadata preservation is a big pain point for many people — I'd be curious whether that's the first thing folks would want added, or if simple bulk export already covers most needs.
want to clarify if you want to:
1. be able to filter photos by passing in album info, such as `./darwin-photos ls --album "vacation" --start 2023-01-01 --local`, OR
2. backup photos + album info so that we know what album each photos belong to in the backup file (i assume you mean this)
if 2nd, no it is currently not preserving that. it is keeping the original photos only, without much metadata encoded
why do you want album / tags info? can u help me understand your usecase better, thank you very much
If you can list albums, and then foreach $album fetch, you can (at a cost of probably re fetching images) do what I want and then post fact reduce the duplicates to hard links.
So if the tool includes a list, not fetch function and includes list albums in a format which matches a get album name or ID, you can do what I want crudely.
feel free to install the latest version and try:
- `darwin-photos albums` list album names
- `darwin-photos ls --album <album_name> --json` will list all photos of the album
do let me know if any valuable feature you're looking for
Ideally all of it, but album is the primary case. Sidecar files would be fine, or an sqlite3 schema, or even a CSV if it meant scripting recreation of e.g. a link farm from photos as sharded images to directories of albums.
Tags, that's just icing on the cake for me. That said, exif compatible metadata for date helps a LOT.
It's macOS-only and intentionally minimal — the goal is just to download originals from iCloud Photos to disk without syncing everything into Photos.app first.
To be clear on limitations: it doesn't preserve albums or other metadata yet, and it's not meant to replace more full-featured tools. It’s mainly for the "I just want my photos off iCloud for backup" case.
Reading the comments here, it sounds like metadata preservation is a big pain point for many people — I'd be curious whether that's the first thing folks would want added, or if simple bulk export already covers most needs.