Comment by Nextgrid
1 day ago
Thanks to Apple's exceptional software quality the app has plenty of bugs and good luck exporting a lot of files out of said library - you're in for an endless game of spinners (it does some network IO on the main thread), "not responding" and memory leaks.
But hey at least we've got Liquid (gl)ass now.
Worked well for me for 70k photos but took a long time
> Thanks to Apple's exceptional software quality the app has plenty of bugs…
I use Photos for macOS daily and I've never run into a bug with my 50K+ photos library. (To be fair, Photos doesn't do that much, and I use it more as a master catalog with Aperture's spiritual successor Nitro.)
> …and good luck exporting a lot of files out of said library…
Not sure why you would need luck to copy the "Originals" folder from the library package.
> I've never run into a bug with my 50K+ photos library.
Have you tried dragging & dropping a photo from the Photos app to your desktop to export it as a file?
I just tried it and while the Photos app UI didn't freeze (I guess either my memory is bad and the spinner behavior was on imports, or they fixed it since 2 years ago), but it takes ~3 seconds for a single photo to appear as a file on my desktop (with no UI or any indicator that something is happening), and dragging & dropping 45 photos took over a minute (again with no progress indicator).
Granted, it turns out I didn't have "download originals" on (not sure if it was always like that or got reset during an update) so hopefully for Apple it's that - but I still think at the very least a progress indicator on what seems like a network IO operation is in order (and I wonder what happens if I interrupted my network connection during its operation - does it just silently never complete and my files never appear, actually show an UI, or just crash?).
Edit: well nevermind, despite all the files apparently exporting just fine, ~5 minutes later after initiating the operation I just got a hideous popup that some files failed to export: https://imgur.com/a/SFXZB5N
It's progress, at least it's the first indication in the UI that something was actually happening. You will notice that the error text is truncated, the only way to read it all is to resize the window (no hover text) and for some reason the horizontal scroll in this UI element does not follow your touchpad - you have to scroll, lift your fingers, and ~1 second later the UI suddenly applies your scroll operation.
Also, it turns out that resizing the window finally readjusted the table control and now the table actually matches the size of its container and isn't scrollable anymore. Which might be a good thing as it at least alleviates the bug mentioned previously, but then why did the control initialize oversized to begin with?
Again this is the kind of jank I'd expect from Linux, and nowadays maybe Windows. But not Mac.
> copy the "Originals" folder from the library package
My bad, I wasn't aware of said folder; I treated the "package" as an internal implementation detail equivalent to a proprietary format and wasn't going through it. I don't think it's a fair expectation to have (potentially non-technical) people to right click "Show package contents" while the usual double-click on the file just opens the library in the Photos app.