I searched through target features and this community but, surprisingly, haven’t seen any reference to supporting Apple Photos Library. As a long time Aperture user, I begrudgingly converted to Photos and have been searching for a workable solution ever since.
While I would gladly abandon Photos for all of my “real” photos, I do like to use iCloud for my phone’s photos. As such, it would be great if I could link Aspect to the Photos library to have it “automagically” add my phone’s photos into the Aspect catalog.
For the phone case specifically, we currently have an iOS app in TestFlight (still has some known issues and shouldn’t be used productively just yet): TestFlight im App Store
We could also pretty easily add a new menu entry “Import photos from Apple Photos” that would perform more or less the same on the desktop, just in the form of an explicit import. It wouldn’t import albums and other Photos specific organization and it would create a copy of each photo, so it’s not an ideal solution for working with both systems in parallel, but it would get the job done to make the phone photos available.
My simple workflow right now is to import from iOS with Apple Photos to pre-sort them a bit by events. I also split images and videos apart, because Aspect does not handle videos.
I can then export certain albums/events from the Apple Photos Library and move them into aspect as a new event.
Sorry, I completely missed replying to this at the time. So we actually added a simple Apple Photos import in the release candidate. This will import all images from the main Photos Library, but does not currently allow things like selective imports, importing albums or importing from an external Photos library.
I also split images and videos apart, because Aspect does not handle videos
More details on this would be interesting. Aspect in general does support videos and is also using the operating system provided framework on macOS, so in theory it should support all formats that are supported by Finder/Quicktime. Do you have any particular video formats that don’t work or are not displayed at all?
Hi @Soenke, Just found Aspect! Wow! I have been looking for a solution to get out of Apple Photos. When choosing the Import from Apple Photos option on macOS, it shows 0 photos in library. My Apple photos library is currently at ~58,000 photos and ~2,000 videos. I totally understand not bringing along the videos, no issue there.
Anything I might try to get Aspect to see my Library? THANKS!
The situation with accessing Apple Photos on macOS is quite frustrating in that it was rather tricky to get it working in the first place, but then it got broken again due to how macOS 15 handles access permissions. As far as I can see, all the different requirements (bundle entries, entitlements and provisioning profiles) are all in place and the OS asks for permission as it should, but when the application then tries to access the library, it just fails as if permission hadn’t been granted.
For the time being, the only way is to export everything from the Photos app (dragging into a folder or using File → Export) and then use the regular folder based import in Aspect (directly exporting into an Aspect library folder should work as well).
I’ll continue to experiment with this to hopefully find a solution soon.
Shoot, that’s super annoying. I am not surprised given how many other things macOS 15 broke for me.. Thanks for the background! I am super excited to get digging into Aspect.
I’m new to Aspect, so maybe I’m misunderstanding, but for what it’s worth, I don’t recall the system asking me for permission to access the Photos library. Also when going into the Privacy & Security settings of my system, I’m not seeing Aspect being listed under Photos.
Aspect 1.0.0-rc.14 was a clean, first time install on macOS 15.4.1
The current release version is still missing a necessary field in its plist file that is needed to display the permission dialog, which means that it is officially broken on the current version of macOS. However, I’ve tried a lot of things to make this work with internal test releases and failed to do so until now, which is why the corresponding changes haven’t been merged into a release version so far.
With the latest internal state of things, the permission dialog does come up, just like the “limited access” picker dialog. However, the entry in the system settings list never appears and the dialog will correspondingly be displayed again after every application restart. And of course, the main issue is that despite the user giving permission, the application isn’t able to list items in the Photos library.
It looks like this is something related to the application bundle signing or notarization process rather than an issue in the actual code, but unfortunately the operating system doesn’t generate any useful error messages and everything seems to be correct according to the documentation, as well as to various solutions mentioned throughout the web. I’ll probably continue with setting up a minimal test project to rule out any influences of our build setup and see how far that gets.
