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iosphotoalbums.py

A simple tool to convert iOS Photos app albums to folders on disk.

You may be familiar with the DCIM folder that you see when you plug your iPhone into your computer. You may have noticed that the folders and filenames in this folder are almost completely unrelated to the albums that show up in the Photos app.

This script will copy or move the images from this DCIM folder into real folders on your computer according to the albums they belong to.

Prerequisites

You will need libimobiledevice to get the data required for the script.

  • On Debian and derivatives, these packages are: ideviceinstaller python-imobiledevice libimobiledevice-utils libimobiledevice4 libplist2 python-plist ifuse
  • On Arch and derivatives, these packages are: ideviceinstaller libimobiledevice

Then you'll need to pair and mount your iOS device

  1. Connect it via USB
  2. Pair it with idevicepair pair
  3. Create a mountpoint (e.g. ~/iPhone) with ifuse:
mkdir ~/iPhone
ifuse ~/iPhone

You should see that the mountpoint you made has a few files and directories in it. The ones we care about are DCIM, PhotoData/AlbumsMetadata, and PhotoData/Photos.sqlite, so copy them to somewhere outside of the mountpoint. After that, you can unmount your iOS device with fusermount -u ~/iPhone.

Install

  1. Download the script (preferably to a similar place you copied that file and folders to)
  2. Make it executable with chmod +x wherever/you/saved/it/iosphotoalbums.py (or in your file manager)

Usage

The script takes three positional arguments:

  • the path to the DCIM folder
  • the path to the Photos.sqlite folder
  • the path to the AlbumsMetadata folder

By default, the script will output everything to the current directory, so I'd recommend passing a path to -o (output). This is where the album folders will be placed. Put together, the command will look something like this:

./iosphotoalbums.py ./DCIM ./Photos.sqlite ./AlbumsMetadata -o ./albums