My single greatest Photos.app frustration (I have many) is the inability to search the folder hierarchy. Mine contains hundreds semantically important folder names where the hierarchy is also meaningful. Meaning lost in the catastrophic Aperture to Photos migraiton.
This morning I had an hour free so I asked an ai about available utilities and workarounds. It said there are really no good options, but the Python osxphotos module might be able to traverse the folder hierarchy.
I have dabbled in minor Python coding and I have a half-baked Visual Studio Code environment. So I asked Claude 4.5 in Perplexity (this is not a formal supported coding environment) to write me a script that would use osxphotos to build a text file representation of the hierarchy. I ran whatever it generated.
It took 4-5 tries. I never edited the code myself. The first time there were copious errors, I describe errors and requested a redo. The next two times there were fewer errors, but I only got the top level of the hierarchy. The ai added debug code. It took two more tries of running and reporting errors to get a script that generated the text file I wanted (example):
[Teams and Orgs / MN Special Hockey / MNSH 2006 pre-season] MNSpecialHockey_060317
[Teams and Orgs / MN Special Hockey / MNSH 2022-2023] MSH 2023 Printed
[Teams and Orgs / MN Special Hockey / MNSH Woodbury 2019-2020] MSH Portraits Jan 2020
[Teams and Orgs / MN Special Hockey / MNSH 2008-2009] Nov 2008 MN SH Section 108 Event
[Teams and Orgs / MN Special Hockey / MNSH 2021-2022] Portraits MNSH Woodbury 2022
This is most personally valuable code I have ever "produced" since my days of writing the "medtrans" C program to turn 1990s MEDLINE output into tab delimited importable text.
And I wrote none of it.
I'll be cleaning it up and refining it, but below is the code I have today. It also included album names within a containing folder - I didn't want that but now I find it useful so I'll leave it.
Code
#!/usr/bin/env python3
"""
Export Photos folder and album hierarchy to a text file with tab indentation.
Requires: pip install osxphotos
"""
import osxphotos
from pathlib import Path
def export_folder_hierarchy(output_file="photos_folders.txt"):
"""
Export Photos library folder/album structure to a text file.
Args:
output_file: Path to output text file (default: photos_folders.txt)
"""
# Initialize connection to Photos library
photosdb = osxphotos.PhotosDB()
# Get folders and albums
folders = photosdb.folder_info
albums = photosdb.album_info
print(f"Found {len(folders)} folders and {len(albums)} albums")
# Build maps for folders
folder_map = {f.uuid: {'obj': f, 'children': [], 'type': 'folder'} for f in folders}
# Add albums to the structure
for album in albums:
# Albums have folder_names property which is a list of folder names in the path
if hasattr(album, 'folder_names') and album.folder_names:
# Try to find the parent folder by matching folder names
# folder_names is a list like ['Top Folder', 'Sub Folder']
# We want to match the first (top-level) folder name
top_folder_name = album.folder_names[0] if album.folder_names else None
if top_folder_name:
# Find folder with matching title
parent_folder = None
for folder in folders:
if folder.title == top_folder_name:
parent_folder = folder
break
if parent_folder and parent_folder.uuid in folder_map:
folder_map[parent_folder.uuid]['children'].append({
'obj': album,
'type': 'album',
'title': album.title,
'folder_path': ' / '.join(album.folder_names) if album.folder_names else ''
})
# Recursive function to write hierarchy
def write_item(f, item_data, level=0):
"""Write item and its children with proper indentation."""
indent = '\t' * level
if item_data['type'] == 'folder':
folder = item_data['obj']
f.write(f"{indent}{folder.title}/\n")
# Sort children alphabetically
children = sorted(item_data['children'], key=lambda x: x.get('title', x.get('obj').title).lower())
for child in children:
if child['type'] == 'album':
# Write album with its folder path if nested
folder_path = child.get('folder_path', '')
if folder_path:
f.write(f"{indent}\t[{folder_path}] {child['title']}\n")
else:
f.write(f"{indent}\t{child['title']}\n")
else:
write_item(f, child, level + 1)
# Find root folders
root_folders = [folder_map[f.uuid] for f in folders if f.parent is None]
root_folders = sorted(root_folders, key=lambda x: x['obj'].title.lower())
# Write to output file
with open(output_file, 'w', encoding='utf-8') as f:
f.write("Photos Library Folder Hierarchy\n")
f.write("=" * 50 + "\n\n")
for root in root_folders:
write_item(f, root)
print(f"Folder hierarchy exported to: {Path(output_file).absolute()}")
print(f"Total top-level folders: {len(root_folders)}")
if __name__ == "__main__":
export_folder_hierarchy()
