Photo wrangling

macOS
1

Hi Automators! I have a problem and need your help to fix it.

  1. I use photos on my iphone. I have a LOT.
  2. I would like to preserve storage space on my iPhone (for obvious reasons) and weekly will remove all my photos from my iphone, backing them up via camera uploads to dropbox.
  3. This removes them from my icloud library. I do not want this to happen really.

I’m currently importing all my photos from Dropbox into Photos, as I would like to use it a bit more. But this situation isn’t ideal.

I’m more than happy to consider third-party photo-wrangling tools and organisers, but ideally I want the whole thing to be as automated as possible.

I’d be grateful for any input, I can’t seem to find much stuff out there on the web about this.

Thanks so much!

2

In your post, you say:

  • You want to free up space on your iPhone.
  • You want to keep photos in your iCloud Library.
  • You want to use Dropbox a bit more … but there is something about it that is not ideal.
  • You are happy to use a third party tool to do “photo-wrangling” and organising.
  • You want your use case to be automated.

Could you describe what it is you actually want to do? There are potentially conflicting points and nothing that actually says exactly what it is you want to do.

  • I don’t know what photo-wrangling is and how that might differ from organising.
  • I don’t understand what you want and do not want to do with Dropbox or how you want your iCloud library to fit into this.

If you haven’t looked into optimised storage in the photo and video management, then that is probably something for you to familiarise yourself with to address your storage in iCloud.

For automation with third party services, you might want to look at what Shortcuts support they have. That tends to be the most accessible automation option on an iPhone, and what the service offers in terms of native (or maybe API or SFTP) may be applicable.

3

Hey Stephen, I hope you’re doing well. Good points, well-made.

‘wrangling’ = organising into albums, searching for faces and having my computer/an app do all that sort of thing for me. Photos is ok at this, but just. I guess it’s not that different from organising.

I didn’t realise Apple had introduced optimising of photos (I’m a busy professional with a life that’s not necessarily 100% oriented around technology, I’m something of a weekend warrior when it comes to all this sort of stuff.) Thanks for sharing that link.

4

Does that optimisation information cover what you need, or are you looking for something else specific?

5

It’s definitely helpful yes. I’m actually trying an app called Excire Foto, which has some seriously impressive AI-powered facial recognition tools. It’s probably overkill for my use case, but there doesn’t seem to be much else on the market for organisation (that’s not adobe). Appreciate the help/advice.

6

I have 170,488 photos right now on my phone. How many images are you trying to manage?

7

Yeah, you know what, since I’ve posted this, and Stephen told me about the optimisation on my phone, I’ve just stopped worrying about it. Tbh my info on file/photo storage was way out of date.