Getting your photos out of Shotwell

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Somewhat a while ago now, I wrote about how every time I return to write some software for the Mac, the preferred language has changed. The purpose of this adventure was to get my photos out of the aging Shotwell and onto my (then new) Mac and the Apple Photos App.

I’ve had a pretty varied experience with photo management on Linux over the past couple of decades. For a while I used f-spot as it was the new hotness. At some point this became…. slow and crashy enough that it was unusable. Today, it appears that the GitHub project warns that current bugs include “Not starting”.

At some point (and via a method I have long since forgotten), I did manage to finally get my photos over to Shotwell, which was the new hotness at the time. That data migration was so long ago now I actually forget what features I was missing from f-spot that I was grumbling about. I remember the import being annoying though. At some point in time Shotwell was no longer was the new hotness and now there is GNOME Photos. I remember looking at GNOME Photos, and seeing no method of importing photos from Shotwell, so put it aside. Hopefully that situation has improved somewhere.

At some point Shotwell was becoming rather stagnated, and I noticed more things stopping to work rather than getting added features and performance. The good news is that there has been some more development activity on Shotwell, so hopefully my issues with it end up being resolved.

One recommendation for Linux photo management was digiKam, and one that I never ended up using full time. One of the reasons behind that was that I couldn’t really see any non manual way to import photos from Shotwell into it.

With tens of thousands of photos (~58k at the time of writing), doing things manually didn’t seem like much fun at all.

As I postponed my decision, I ended up moving my main machine over to a Mac for a variety of random reasons, and one quite motivating thing was the ability to have Photos from my iPhone magically sync over to my photo library without having to plug it into my computer and copy things across.

So…. how to get photos across from Shotwell on Linux to Photos on a Mac/iPhone (and also keep a very keen eye on how to do it the other way around, because, well, vendor lock-in isn’t great).

It would be kind of neat if I could just run Shotwell on the Mac and have some kind of import button, but seeing as there wasn’t already a native Mac port, and that Shotwell is written in Vala rather than something I know has a working toolchain on macOS…. this seemed like more work than I’d really like to take on.

Luckily, I remembered that Shotwell’s database is actually just a SQLite database pointing to all the files on disk. So, if I could work out how to read it accurately, and how to import all the relevant metadata (such as what Albums a photo is in, tags, title, and description) into Apple Photos, I’d be able to make it work.

So… is there any useful documentation as to how the database is structured?

Semi annoyingly, Shotwell is written in Vala, a rather niche programming language that while integrating with all the GObject stuff that GNOME uses, is largely unheard of. Luckily, the database code in Shotwell isn’t too hard to read, so was a useful fallback for when the documentation proves inadequate.

So, I armed myself with the following resources:

Programming the Mac side of things, it was a good excuse to start looking at Swift, so knowing I’d also need to read a SQLite database directly (rather than use any higher level abstraction), I armed myself with the following resources:

From here, I could work on getting the first half going, the ability to view my Shotwell database on the Mac (which is what I posted a screenshot of back in Feb 2022).

But also, I had to work out what I was doing on the other end of things, how would I import photos? It turns out there’s an API!

A bit of SwiftUI code:

import SwiftUI
import AppKit
import Photos

struct ContentView: View {
    @State var favorite_checked : Bool = false
    @State var hidden_checked : Bool = false
    var body: some View {
        VStack() {
            Text("Select a photo for import")
            Toggle("Favorite", isOn: $favorite_checked)
            Toggle("Hidden", isOn: $hidden_checked)
            Button("Import Photo")
            {
                let panel = NSOpenPanel()
                panel.allowsMultipleSelection = false
                panel.canChooseDirectories = false
                if panel.runModal() == .OK {
                    let photo_url = panel.url!
                    print("selected: " + String(photo_url.absoluteString))
                    addAsset(url: photo_url, isFavorite: favorite_checked, isHidden: hidden_checked)
                }
            }
            .padding()
        }
    }
}

struct ContentView_Previews: PreviewProvider {
    static var previews: some View {
        ContentView()
    }
}

Combined with a bit of code to do the import (which does look a bunch like the examples in the docs):

import SwiftUI
import Photos
import AppKit

@main
struct SinglePhotoImporterApp: App {
    var body: some Scene {
        WindowGroup {
            ContentView()
        }
    }
}

func addAsset(url: URL, isFavorite: Bool, isHidden: Bool) {
    // Add the asset to the photo library.
    let path = "/Users/stewart/Pictures/1970/01/01/1415446258647.jpg"
    let url = URL(fileURLWithPath: path)
    PHPhotoLibrary.shared().performChanges({
        let addedImage = PHAssetChangeRequest.creationRequestForAssetFromImage(atFileURL: url)
        addedImage?.isHidden = isHidden
        addedImage?.isFavorite = isFavorite
    }, completionHandler: {success, error in
        if !success { print("Error creating the asset: \(String(describing: error))") } else
        {
            print("Imported!")
        }
    })
}

This all meant I could import a single photo. However, there were some limitations.

There’s the PHAssetCollectionChangeRequest to do things to Albums, so it would solve that problem, but I couldn’t for the life of me work out how to add/edit Titles and Descriptions.

It was so close!

So what did I need to do in order to import Titles and Descriptions? It turns out you can do that via AppleScript. Yes, that thing that launched in 1993 and has somehow survived the transition of m68k based Macs to PowerPC based Macs to Intel based Macs to ARM based Macs.

The Photos dictionary for AppleScript

So, just to make it easier to debug what was going on, I started adding code to my ShotwellImporter tool that would generate snippets of AppleScript I could run and check that it was doing the right thing…. but then very quickly ran into a problem…. it appears that the AppleScript language interpreter on modern macOS has limits that you’d be more familiar with in 1993 than 2023, and I very quickly hit limits where the script would just error out before running (I was out of dictionary size allegedly).

But there’s a new option! Everything you can do with AppleScript you can now do with JavaScript – it’s just even less documented than AppleScript is! But it does work! I got to the point where I could generate JavaScript that imported photos, into all the relevant albums, and set title and descriptions.

A useful write up of using JavaScript rather than AppleScript to do things with Photos: https://mudge.name/2019/11/13/scripting-photos-for-macos-with-javascript/

More recent than when I was doing my hacking, https://alexwlchan.net/2023/managing-albums-in-photos/ is a good read.

With luck I’ll find some time to write up a bit of a walkthrough of my code, and push it up somewhere.

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