I’m curious about the plusses and minuses of using image files from within Apple’s Photos.app, that is, without exporting them into a separate folder outside the app’s usual organization.
I’ve seen the posts about the possibility (and reality) of Photos changing its internal structure and moving the files around and that makes sense, though I see that a shell script has already been posted that should fix that and I can imagine coming up with an AppleScript that could as well. Are there other issues?
From my perspective, Photos is very handy in managing photos taken on your iPhone (as I often do) and from other cameras, and it also handles GPS data and corrections to it quite nicely. Keeping the files within Photos also avoids duplicating them, of course. And there’s the fact that I’ve got a ton of photos already imported onto my computer.
OTOH, one issue with importing via the media panel while leaving the images in Photos is that it gives the image the long, random Photos ID as their names and doesn’t show their “actual” file names (that is, the original name of the file, which is the name of the file Photos will export).
Are there other issues to worry about or like about leaving files in Photos?
PS One way to avoid the filename issue is to create symlinks for the image files in Photos and save them in a separate directory folder with the “correct” filenames. (I already have an AppleScript that does this.) Tropy can then import those. The symlinks could be organized topically and even using subfolders…though I could do this with the originals in Photos, too.