I am very new to AppleScript but have worked extensively (for years) with other scripting languages, so not entirely new to the game. I have just sadly said goodbye to Aperture and imported my nearly 100K digital images into Photos (so I'm also brand new to Photos). I would like to make a sane structure for finding images, i.e.
Folders named for Year (e.g. 2004)
contain Folders named for Month (e.g. 05)
contain Albums named for each day for which there are images (e.g. 2004-05-03)
(yes this is basically the Picasa convention, which I am accustomed to and like)
Having imported my 100K images into Photos, apparently with success, I find that they are organised by default into "Moments" (i.e. dates), but there is no hierarchical organisation to make browsing easier, as above. So I would like to write an AppleScript to do as follows:
foreach Moment
parse the date and create folder for year if it does not exist already
create folder inside year for month if not exists already
create album inside month for day, if not exists already
assign all photos in this Moment to that album
Seems simple enough, and it would take tens of hours by hand :-) so never going to happen unless I can script it. I've been reading the (seemingly rather limited) AppleScript dictionary for Photos and so far have not seen any useful reference to Moments, as in how to loop through a list of them all, find list of images contained in one, etc. I see the object "moment" defined with two attributes, ID and name; but I'm floundering around a bit trying to find the master list of all Moments or the contents of Moments.
I have a feeling that 2 paragraphs or one chunk of sample code from someone familiar with this app (and with AppleScript) would save me hours of googling. Does anyone know how to go about this?
[update]
I have tried DLing and installing a promising script library for Photos
https://photosautomation.com/scripting/script-library.html
but so far have not been able to get any of its functions to execute. I have also tried the most basic exploratory command to Photos:
tell application "Photos"
activate
set moms to the moments of application
display dialog moms
end tell
and got a not-too-enlightening error message:
error "Can’t get every moment of application." number -1728 from every «class IPmm» of application
I wrote this on Yosemite (10.10.5) for Photos 1.0.1 so it may need some modifications for you, but it's the best I could do, hopefully it will work on your OS. I tried to comment it for you so you'd be able to see what it was doing.
on run
tell application "Photos"
set mediaItems to every media item
repeat with mediaItem in mediaItems
set mdate to (date of mediaItem) -- get the date of the file
set yearName to year of mdate as string -- year of the file
set YrFolder to my yearFolder(yearName) -- make the year folder
set mmonth to month of mdate -- month of the file
set monthName to my monthNum(mmonth as string) -- month name as a number
set SubFold to my subFolder(monthName, YrFolder) -- make the month number folder
set mday to day of mdate -- day of the file
set dayName to my dayNum(mday as string) -- get the day as a two digit number
set albumName to yearName & "-" & monthName & "-" & dayName as string -- create the album name
set finalAlbum to my makeAlbum(albumName, SubFold) -- make the album
add {mediaItem} to finalAlbum -- put the item in the album
end repeat
end tell
end run
on dayNum(mday)
if (count of characters in mday) = 1 then
return "0" & mday as string
else
return mday as string
end if
end dayNum
on monthNum(mmonth)
if mmonth = "January" then
set num to "01"
else if mmonth = "February" then
set num to "02"
else if mmonth = "March" then
set num to "03"
else if mmonth = "April" then
set num to "04"
else if mmonth = "May" then
set num to "05"
else if mmonth = "June" then
set num to "06"
else if mmonth = "July" then
set num to "07"
else if mmonth = "August" then
set num to "08"
else if mmonth = "September" then
set num to "09"
else if mmonth = "October" then
set num to "10"
else if mmonth = "November" then
set num to "11"
else if mmonth = "December" then
set num to "12"
end if
return num
end monthNum
on makeAlbum(albName, theFolder)
tell application "Photos"
set yrFold to name of parent of theFolder
if exists container albName of container (name of theFolder) of container yrFold then
return (container albName of container (name of theFolder) of container yrFold)
else
return make new album named albName at theFolder
end if
end tell
end makeAlbum
on subFolder(subName, YrFolder)
tell application "Photos"
if exists container subName of container (name of YrFolder) then
return container subName of container (name of YrFolder)
else
return make new folder named subName at YrFolder
end if
end tell
end subFolder
on yearFolder(yearName)
tell application "Photos"
if container named yearName exists then
return container named yearName
else
try
return make new folder named yearName
on error
return ""
end try
end if
end tell
end yearFolder
Best of luck with it, would love to know if it works for you.
Current working version
Code is now too long to post here, but thanks for the starting point! it's running even now -- painfully slowly, of course, but seems to be working. There are over 97K images in my Photos library so this could take days. [update: 10000 images every 2 hours, so about 18 hours] AS syntax still strikes me as decidedly odd :-) but thanks to your sample code I could whack this together PDQ and, I hope, solve the problem.
[update] YES, it worked. about 20 hrs run time, zero errors, and looks like success. thanks very much for the code sample. problem solved.
