OSXPhotos

What is OSXPhotos?

OSXPhotos provides both the ability to interact with and query Apple’s Photos.app library on macOS directly from your python code as well as a very flexible command line interface (CLI) app for exporting photos. You can query the Photos library database – for example, file name, file path, and metadata such as keywords/tags, persons/faces, albums, etc. You can also easily export both the original and edited photos.

Supported operating systems

Works on macOS and linux. Some features are compatible only with macOS.

This package will read Photos databases for any supported version on any supported macOS version. E.g. you can read a database created with Photos 5.0 on MacOS 10.15 on a machine running macOS 10.12 and vice versa.

Requires python >= 3.10.

Installation

The recommended way to install osxphotos is via the uv python package manager tool.

Installation using uv

  • Open Terminal (search for Terminal in Spotlight or look in Applications/Utilities)

  • Install uv by running the following command in Terminal:

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

If you previously installed uv, upgrade to the latest version:

uv self update

  • Type the following into Terminal:

uv tool install --python 3.12 osxphotos

  • Now you should be able to run osxphotos by typing: osxphotos

Once you’ve installed osxphotos with uv, to upgrade to the latest version:

uv tool upgrade osxphotos

If you want to try osxphotos without installing it, you can run uv tool run --python 3.12 osxphotos or uvx --python 3.12 osxphotos.

Note: If installing on an older version of macOS and you encounter issues installing with uv, try installing python 3.12 from [python.org](https://www.python.org/downloads/) then running uv to install osxphotos.

Installation using pip

You can install osxphotos directly from pypi:

python3 -m pip install osxphotos

Once you’ve installed osxphotos with pip, to upgrade to the latest version:

python3 -m pip install --upgrade osxphotos

Installation via MacPorts

If you use the MacPorts package manager on a Mac:

sudo port install osxphotos

Installation on Linux

At least one of the Linux-specific python packages normally installed on Linux may cause an error during installation with pip or pipx. If you encounter an error similar to: pip._vendor.packaging.version.InvalidVersion: Invalid version: '6.5.0-1022-generic, you should still be able to install osxphotos by creating and activating a virtual environment:

python3 -m venv .venv-osxphotos
source .venv-osxphotos/bin/activate
python3 -m pip install osxphotos

To use osxphotos you will need to ensure the venv is activated using source .venv-osxphotos/bin/activate.

You may name the virtual environment anything you want; .venv-osxphotos is used in this example to make it clear the virtual environment is used by osxphotos and to avoid conflict with other virtual environments which, by convention, are often named .venv or venv.

Command Line Usage

This package will install a command line utility called osxphotos that allows you to query the Photos database and export photos.