Remove empty albums

[habi]

From a botched merge of libraries with PowerPhotos a long time ago I have very large amount of duplicate albums in Photos, several hierarchies deep (see screenshot1).
Merging/deleting these manually, is a big chore, which I've put off for much too long.

A lot of these albums are empty, and also show up as such when I call osxphotos albums (see screenshot2).

Is there a way to use osxphotos to programmatically remove all empty albums in my library?

osxphotos 0.65.0
Photos Version 9.0 (610.3.110)
macOS 14.1.2 (23B92)

[RhetTbull]

This isn't possible out of the box but via the PhotoScript library (another of my projects) it is possible to delete albums and folders. I think it would not be hard to write a script that osxphotos could run to do this. Let me think about it and get back to you.

[habi]

BTW: kind of embarrassing, I've asked the same question there a while ago: RhetTbull/PhotoScript#26 (comment)
Shows how long I've been procrastinating on fixing this :)

[RhetTbull]

@habi I wrote a quick script to do this that can be run with osxphotos (version 0.65.0 and later). You can run the script directly from GitHub without downloading it first via:

osxphotos run https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos/main/examples/delete_empty_albums.py --folders --dry-run

It has only 2 options: --folders: prune empty folders and --dry-run: show what will be done without actually deleting anything.

There is one limitation: empty subfolders cannot be deleted (though these will be listed so you can manually delete them). This is due to a bug in Apple Photos that frustratingly has been there since macOS Catalina. I'm on Ventura and it's still not fixed (have not tested Sonoma).