Ryan's Journal

After several years of dealing with trying to make approximately DVD-sized libraries out of iPhoto by hand for backup purposes, I finally got around to writing an AppleScript that takes in one library and spits out as many less-than-4.7GB libraries as needed to cover the photos, non-destructively retaining any album and metadata information associated with those photos, by successive copying and removing of excess.

It's entertaining to watch your memories wiped out live. Grab it from GitHub. Caveat, you need twice as much disk space on the same volume as your original library, and it's going to take a lot of time, around N2/5+N minutes, where N is the size of your original library in GB (so it took my ~100GB library about a day and a half to finish).

"Finally," because iPhoto is a terrible piece of software for real photography, and the need to flee hit the tipping point. What kind of software needs the user to write in horrible AppleScript to make it do something elementary? Goodbye iPhoto, hello Lightroom.

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