Today, I started the next phase of my photo consolidation project – photos from the Apple library for days which already had some photos in Lightroom. I knew that a lot of the photos that I’d be looking at were ones which I’d already rejected, so I wanted to figure out a workflow that would make it easy to sift the photos quickly.

About half of the photos I’m looking at have the same filename as a photo on the same day that’s already in Lightroom – I’m going to deal with that batch later. Right now, I’m going through the photos which have unique filenames, a day at a time.

I import all of the orphan phots for a day into Lightroom and mark them with a purple color label so I can identify them quickly as I scroll through the day’s photos.

Something in the past duplicated a LOT of photos and added a “-2” to the filename of one of the copies; those are easy to get rid of.

I have found a few photos which weren’t duplicates that I decided to keep, but very few.

I got through three years of candidate photos in a bit over an hour this evening. I think that’s a good sign!

It was a busy day and I made a lot of progress on bringing all my photos into Lightroom.

In the process, I realized that I needed a bigger SSD for the photo library, so we went to Best Buy at The Plant to pick one up; I chose that location because I thought traffic would be light and parking easy (unlike, say, Santana Row) – and I was right. It was lunchtime, so we had lunch at The Halal Guys – I wasn’t terribly impressed, especially given the amount of hype that accompanied their move into the Bay Area.

Somehow, a few hundred of the files I’d exported from Photos didn’t have a creation date embedded in them, even though the information was in the .XMP sidecar file that the export created. I found a way to use Phil Harvey’s invaluable exiftool to fix the problem so that Lightroom would put the photos in the proper folder when it imported them; it’s a simple script:

if [[ $# -eq 0 ]] ; then
    target="$PWD"
elif [[ $# -eq 1 ]] ; then
    target="$1"
else
    echo 'Too many arguments!' >&2
    exit 1
fi
echo processing $target
exiftool -q --ext xmp \
    -if '-e "$directory/$filename.xmp"'\
    -if 'not $CreateDate' \
    -tagsfromfile %d%f.%e.xmp \
    -@ ${SCRIPT_DIR}/xmp2exif.args \
    -GPSLatitudeRef -GPSLongitudeRef -overwrite_original -r "$target"
if [[ $? ]] ; then
    exiftool '-filecreatedate<createdate' -r "$target"
fi

So now I have the new SSD and have copied my old Lightroom library and catalog to it. I’ve imported all the photos from Photos for those days where I didn’t already have anything in Lightroom (progress!). I will have to go through the days where there’s overlap to avoid bringing photos into Lightroom that I’d already imported and didn’t want to keep (I never went back to Photos to remove those pictures), but I’m retired and have plenty of time!

I haven’t mentioned the success for today, have I? Diane finished creating a digital scrapbook from our Iceland trip last year and sent it off to be printed. I’m looking forward to seeing the physical book!