buzztroll / buzzipick

Buzz iPick

tldr;

The point of this distribution is to serve photos from an Apple Photos database via a non apple system. I backup my Photos library over my network to a hard drive connected to a raspberry pi. I want to be able to use that backup to browse photos as well. This repository is a set of projects that do something with those photos.

In addition, I am hoping to use these project ideas to learn Rust. I started with Python because it is right there and I wanted to see something working quickly.

Explanation

I created this repository because I really like the features that Apple Photos provides, but I hate how proprietary it is. I hate that it only works well on an internal hard drive on a single Apple machine. I tried keeping my album on an external drive, but it is an awful experience. The AI software that finds faces and otherwise organizes the pictures (scary right?... but so convenient!) does not work well if the file system is not always there.

Further I hate that my pictures are organized in an incomprehensible way on the file system. There is no obvious way to make sense of them from just the filesystem, so you pretty much have to only use Apple Photos and you will be stuck with it in perpetuity (the Apple way).

However, the good news is that Apple Photos uses sqlite as its database! Sqlite is amazing and easy and well standardized, thus to make sense of the photo layout all we have to do is reverse engineer the Apple Photos database layout.

This repo has (will have) a few different programs in a couple of languages which do various things with the Apple Photo database. A couple of early examples are:

1. Select a photo at random and serve it as a web page
2. Select a photo at random and show it on the scren like a photo frame

Look in the subdirectories for more information.

buzzipick's Issues

interesting

I already typed this much of a README that no one will ever look at.

I came here just to say that I read it....and looks cool ! 😂

[FR] add options to limit photos selected

this looks great but i would love it if there was a way to only pick photos from a set list of albums

my library has a lot of random junk in there i dont overly want displayed so it would be great to give it a list of all my holiday albums to pull from (or make a smart album that has all the holidays in it if only pulling from 1 album is easier)

i have had a look at the code and i honestly cant work out whats going on with the photos DB access