Converting large video files and putting back using OSXPhotos

[tural-ali]

So I exported my whole library to NAS, ran the following command to move all large videos into one directory

#!/bin/bash

# Set the directory to search and the target directory for large files
search_dir="${1:-.}"
target_dir="$search_dir/large_files"

# Create the target directory if it does not exist
mkdir -p "$target_dir"

# Find and move files larger than 500 MB
find "$search_dir" -type f -size +500M -exec mv {} "$target_dir" \;

echo "Files larger than 500 MB have been moved to $target_dir"

Now I'm going to do the following steps:

1. Convert all of them using a converter
2. Find these videos in Apple photos
3. Remove
4. Add the converted file to Apple Photos
5. Set the metadata as the old file.

Or maybe I could just replace the old file with the converted new file.

Do you think it's something I could achieve with Osxphotos?

[oPromessa]

@tural-ali will try to provide a more complete answer. See #907 where I've done something similar to convert old MPG files into MOV. and reimport.

The new feature osxphotos import --exportdb to recover all Albums and metadata information from the exportdb used to export your large MOV files may even simplify further the workflow on import.

[RhetTbull]

I plan to eventually add a feature to do this kind of transformation (see #909). In the mean time, I think you can do this reasonably well with osxphotos. Export the photos using osxphotos export. You can use --add-exported-to-album "Large Videos" --min-size "500mb" to do the export.

Then convert each video, keeping the name the same.

Then run osxphotos import /path/to/export --walk --exportdb /path/to/export

This will re-import each file and re-apply all metadata and albums. You can then delete the originals from the "Large Videos" album using Cmd+Delete.

[RhetTbull]

@all-contributors please add @tural-ali for testing

[RhetTbull]

@tural-ali Try version 0.68.2 which fixes this error.

[tural-ali]

Checking

[tural-ali]

@RhetTbull

I'm not sure if I got your instructions correct. Here are my commands:
Export command:
osxphotos export --library /Volumes/Storage/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary /Volumes/Storage/large_videos --retry 3 --exportdb ~/.osxphotos_export.db --add-exported-to-album "Large Videos" --min-size "500MB" --verbose

Converted (using Handbrake) from large_videos directory into converted.

Import command:
osxphotos import /Volumes/Storage/converted --walk --exportdb ~/.osxphotos_export.db

Result: All of the videos are added as new files (with today's date of creation), and none of the previous metadata preserved. What am I doing wrong?

[RhetTbull]

Converted (using Handbrake) from large_videos directory into converted

If you want to use the exportdb to match the metadata on import, the converted file has to be exactly the same name and path as the exported file. Otherwise osxphotos cannot match the file to the appropriate metadata.

Now, assuming the directory structure and the file names are exact matches between large_videos and converted, you could do this:

osxphotos import /Volumes/Storage/converted --walk --exportdb ~/.osxphotos_export.db --exportdir /Volumes/Storage/converted

This should re-base the file paths in the export directory to the new directory but the filenames and subdirectories will still nee to be exact matches.

[tural-ali]

osxphotos import /Volumes/Storage/converted --walk --exportdb ~/.osxphotos_export.db --exportdir /Volumes/Storage/converted
this command imports some of the data like, tagged people, geolocations but still file creation dates are the video export date - all of the files are added to the library as they were created 2 days ago.

[tural-ali]

@RhetTbull I think I understood the problem. you mentioned that file names should be exactly the same. all of converted files have .mp4 extension where source files had various extensions: .avi, .mov etc. can this be issue? and if yes, is there any workaround?

[RhetTbull]

Yes, that's likely an issue. These files won't be matched to the original exports because the names are different. This might work:

Re-export the originals using --sidecar JSON --sidecar-drop-ext. This will create a JSON sidecar file for each photo that contains the metadata. The sidecar will be named IMG_1234.json with no extension. Then copy these sidecars into the same directory as the converted file. Thus, osxphotos will see these sidecars as associated with the newly converted files. Then instead of --exportdb ... --exportdir..., use --sidecar as the import option. Sidecars do not convey data on albums so you will lose that but you'll get all the other metadata including the date.

If you use a lot of albums and really need album info, it would be possible to write a custom script to pull this from the export database but I don't have time at the moment to do that.