Amerpie by Lou Plummer

My recent goal has been to get a copy of all my photos onto a local drive and use an app that respects the file system and doesn't hide the files in a mysterious, impenetrable database like Apple Photos does. I am also trying to get Google out of my business, a slow and difficult process.

For years, I've backed up my iPhone photos to three different platforms: iCloud because it's built into iOS and easy, Google Photos, because it's easy to do it automatically using the iOS app and to Amazon because photo storage is included in Prime and my wife and I can use our joint account so all the family photos end up here, including the ones we take with our "real" cameras.

Each platform has disadvantages. None of them mirror your file system. iCloud requires you to use the Apple Photos app. Google and Amazon both require you to use a web browser. I experimented with ways of downloading my photo archives from Apple and was not satisfied with the result. The only alternative is to set up the Photos app to download full-sized images and hope that actually happens.

Downloading content from Amazon involves using the Mac app and choosing folders and albums, a process that is cumbersome and has too much friction to be a practical solution. The simplest way for me to get all of my photos, as files, downloaded to my hard drive in a way that I could name them and organize them as I see fit was through Google Takeout An hour after placing a request to download my photos in 10GB ZIP files, I had an email with the links to 15 archives - the totality of my still photos and videos.

Here's my workflow to turn that massive collection of files into a usable archive.

1. Download the ZIP files using a browser on to an external had drive.
2. Copy one archive at the time to a folder in my Mac home directory. I called mine local,
3. Use Better Zip to unarchive the just the subfolder containing the images and video. Better Zip is great because you don't have to unzip the whole archive to get just the files you want, plus, when you install it, you gain the ability to use Quicklook to inspect the contents of archives without opening them.
4. Use A Better Finder Attributes to change the creation date of the photos to match the creation date contained in the EXIF information.
5. Use Hazel to sort the photos into folders based on the year and month they were taken. Hazel can also name the photos using the same type of convention. My DSLR photos are names my Lightoom, but my iPhone photos have the default names given to them by iOS.You may find it easier to create the Hazel rule if you use Finder's Smart Folders feature to consolidate all the images into a temporary folder before sorting them.
6. After the photos are sorted, you can trash the local copy of the ZIP file and empty your trash.
7. Use a photo management program that respects the files system to inspect, edit and view your photos. Some decent choices are XnViewMP (free), Adobe Bridge (free), FlowVision (free), Musebox ($15),[Picview](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/picview-image-viewer/id6452016140?mt=12)($12.99), Pixea ($9.99)
   
   Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇