Is there attribute that shows date when photo was added to Photos app?

[ghost]

Hi there,

my use case is the following:
I want to create every day at 12:01am a backup of all photos that were added the day before.

For that I use '```from_date```` to find photos from the day before.
The flaw: I might add photos taken by another camera then my iPhone sometime days or weeks later.
The problem is that from_date looks at the photo creation date and not that date the photo was added to Photos app.

I tried to find an appropriate in the doc but it seems there is no such attribute available.
So question is:

1. In case I have overlooked it: what is the name?
2. In case it does not exist, is it possible to add it?
3. What would be a workaround (I was thinking into the direction to compare the filenames, etc. but that would mean I had to always check against the whole library of +44k photos - not very efficient)?

Thanks a lot,
Kevin

[RhetTbull]

@Hafur there's not currently a way to access the date added. It won't be hard to to do this so I'll add it to the to-do list. The relevant data appears to be in ZGENERICASSET.ZADDEDDATE but I'll have to do some testing to confirm.

However, for your use case, osxphotos export --update may get you close. --update exports only the photos not previously exported, thus if you run this every day, it would only export those photos added the previous day.

Note --update stores state information about the backup / export in a file called .osxphotos_export.db in the export directory. So this approach only works if you're nightly backups are all in the same directory.

[ghost]

great! thanks a lot! I'll be patient and wait for the implementation. I do some other things as part of the export in Python and would not want to rely on the command line right now.
thanks again!

[RhetTbull]

@Hafur In the latest version on Github I've added a PhotoInfo.date_added attribute. It returns a timezone aware datetime.datetime object as do the other dates in PhotoInfo.

Caveats:

• this only works for Photos 5+ (Catalina+) as I've not figured out where the date is stored in Photos 4 which has a different schema
• On Photos <= 4, returns None
• I've not yet added any tests or documentation
• I've not yet pushed a new release (won't until tests/docs updated)

If you use this and have any feedback, let me know! I'll get this into the next release.

[RhetTbull]

@Hafur give this a try:

>>> from osxphotos.imageconverter import ImageConverter
>>> converter = ImageConverter()
>>> converter.write_jpeg("/users/rhet/Downloads/test.heic","/users/rhet/Downloads/test.jpeg")
True
>>>

You can access the image converter through FileUtil class which is a special class with several utilities osxphotos uses to enable the --dry-run feature (there's a version of this class with no-op methods that don't actually do anything that can be dropped in when using --dry-run). To use it from FileUtil, try the following--note the convert_to_jpeg method which calls ImageConverter is a class method so you don't need a FileUtil instance:

>>> from osxphotos.fileutil import FileUtil
>>> FileUtil.convert_to_jpeg("/users/rhet/Downloads/test.heic","/users/rhet/Downloads/test.jpeg")
True
>>>

[ghost]

thanks a bunch!
I tried your suggestions on my Mac mini (running High Sierra hence Photos v3) and throws the same error.
However, on my Big Sur MacBook all variants (that is my code and your code) work fine. So it seems I have found yet one more reason to upgrade my Mac mini :-)

[RhetTbull]

Interesting. It should work fine on High Sierra as far as a I know. I just tried it on my 2013 iMac with Sierra and it worked. (Like you, my primary photos workflow is on an older Mac...hence once reason I try to maintain backwards compatibility all the way back to Sierra for everything I do in osxphotos). However, I do focus new development on Catalina+ so won't spend much time trying to figure out why it didn't work in your case. The API call is supported on all MacOS versions but it does require a GPU. I looked up the tech specifications for 2010-2011 Mac Minis and they do have GPUs.

[RhetTbull]

By the way, I figured out how to get the "date added" in Photos 3 but it will take more work to implement than it did for Photos 5. I'll get to it when I can. But you should still upgrade your Mac :-)

[ghost]

thanks so much for that - really appreciated.
however, I have decided to upgrade. There are so many advantages. So for now I keep using my MacBook to create those daily backups (which are then transferred to the Mac mini's raid cluster).
BTW regarding the ImageConverter(): Could the issue be that I am running my MacMini headless? I think I remember reading ling time ago that the MacMini acts up when having no HDMI cable connected to it. I will try over the weekend if I can get a monitor connected and try it again.
Thanks again!

[ghost]

btw: the new attribute date_added works perfectly! Thanks lot!

[RhetTbull]

date_added now working for Photos >= 2 as of release 0.42.17