Photos Takeout 4+
Export Albums, Years, Moments
App Initio Limited
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- Free
- Offers In-App Purchases
Screenshots
Description
Export Mac Photos library and iCloud Photos at full resolution into folders by year, album or date. Also Shared Albums and Favorites! For Sierra to Sonoma. Try it free!
Export photos and videos from Apple Photos in folders by years, albums or dates. One-click export of all or selected folders. Save on Mac, in external HD, Google Drive, Dropbox or anywhere else. Preserves image resolution, file format and metadata. Compatible with macOS Sonoma and all the way back to Sierra.
Super-easy to use: Select the source Photos library, destination and the years, albums or moments to be extracted. It's all exported in a familiar folder structure. You can't do this with Photos' Export function: you'll get one humongous, unusable folder.
Photos Takeout's free version exports only one photo per folder, so you can see how the app works. Unlock exports with a one-time in-app purchase:
- POWER version: For Photos libraries of up to 50 GB.
- PRO POWER: Handles even multi-Terabyte libraries.
POWER users can upgrade to PRO POWER anytime with POWER UP in-app purchase, by only paying the price difference.
Examples of when to use Photos Takeout:
- To make yearbooks of your 2017, 2018 and 2019 photos
- To download Shared Albums: Even those added by others
- To export selected albums for printing as photo books
- To move photos from iCloud to external drive. Save $$
- To migrate to other photo management programs or PC
- To share albums or tons of photos with non-Mac users
- To extract photos for reverting to old versions of Photos
MORE ABOUT PHOTOS TAKEOUT
* For Sonoma, Ventura, Monterey, Big Sur, Catalina, Mojave, High Sierra and Sierra
* Works on Intel as well as M1 Silicon Macs
* Migrates photos into a familiar folder format
* Handles all standard photo and video formats
* Preserves albums, file names and EXIF/IPTC metadata
* Exports YYYY folders or YYYY>MM sub-folder hierarchy
* Exports referenced and iCloud based photos
* Exports latest edited versions or unmodified originals
* Preserves custom arrangement of photos in albums
* Exports shared albums (Yours as well as sent by others)
* Can export Live Photos as JPG/HEIC + MOV file pairs
* Extremely easy to use – Can’t go wrong!
* For professional photo organizers as well as lay users
Photos is a great program for organizing and editing pictures, but it stores them in its opaque database structure over which you have no control. You can't click open a folder in Finder and find all photos in it. Can't migrate image assets to another photo management program without losing organization and edits. Can't export an accessible backup to an external drive while retaining your album/folder organization.
Use Photos Takeout to make a human readable backup of your photos. Even if you do auto-back ups on Time Machine, this added layer of protection is good because Time Machine overwrites older backups, so you could still lose data. Remember, iCloud is a syncing service, NOT a backup. Your photos are precious, irreplaceable. Keep them safely backed up in an accessible format with Photos Takeout.
Photos Takeout makes it a breeze to get photos and videos out of Apple Photos, organized exactly as you like.
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HOW IT WORKS
- Select Photos Library (your Photos system library)
- Select destination: e.g. Mac, Dropbox, Google Drive etc.
- Select one or more Years, Albums or Dates
- Use the default export options or customize
- Click Export. That's it.
App includes a User Guide. For help, email us via the app for prompt human-powered support. We don't do automated or canned replies!
Note: Live Photos and burst photos only work in Photos app. Photos Takeout can export these as JPGs (or HEIC) + MOV files. App is compatible with Photos for Mac. Not iPhoto, Aperture or other photo management programs.
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System requirements:
Intel or M1 Silicon Mac with macOS 10.12 and higher, 64 bit (Sierra to Sonoma)
IMPORTANT:
* Source library for Photos Takeout MUST be the same as your Photos system library.
* Photos library must be compatible with the Mac on which Photos Takeout is installed.
What’s New
Version 4.62
Fixed a bug that gave a redundant alert on launching the app.
Ratings and Reviews
Has potential, but needs polishing before it is worth the cost
I was really excited with this app, because it seemed it would be the answer to something I have been wanting to do for a very long time: exporting pics from Photos in an organized and efficient fashion. But a deal-breaker for me is the impossibility to select individual pictures, which seems like a huge oversight from the developper. Right now, the apps only allows to select ALL pictures belonging to specific "groups", like Years, Albums, or Moments. But you cannot open a given group, and select individual pictures to export. This "all or nothing" approach is just not flexible enough for me for justify the cost. There are also some "annoying" things with the app that would need to be polished before I consider buying it: no dark mode support, the app always opens in full screen (every time!!!), and the app also asks for the location of the source Photos library every time it opens, as well as the Destination (the app should be able to remember these settings!). I'll definitely keep an eye on future updates, but will definitely wait to see how it gets improved before purchasing.
Developer Response ,
Manu, thanks for your feedback. We polled a lot of Photos users before deciding to export only complete folders. Yours is the first request we've had for drill-down selection and will see if more users want this. Your point on full screen is noted, we'll fix this. Having to specify source and destination every time is due to tightened permissions requirements in Big Sur [Update: Version 2.6 includes Dark Mode support, app window resizing and remembering window size preference.]
OKAY but takes timestamp from date of export
All files will have the date changed to the actual date of the export. - Not funny and therefore I will not use it but now I turn to osxphotos and write my own export function incl setting the >right< time and date of each picture.
Surprise: they now (Mar 2023) changed the date information it retrieves to the actual date. Took a long time... too long for me.. I deinstalled the app already. Wasted my money. Alternative on mac os x (and free): osxphotos
Developer Response ,
From version 4.10 onward, files exported with Photos Takeout show the original date/time in the Finder > Get Info window. Technically, *Created* date in this window should equal date of the export (which is the convention Apple follows), but non-technical users found this confusing. We hope that our latest enhancement resolves this confusion.
Correctly handles metadata
I have been using Apple Photos to add metadata to photographs i.e. Title, Correct Date, Caption, Keywords and Location. A lot of my photographs have been scanned from prints so the metadata does not exist. However, when you use the Apple Photos export option it drops metadata. I spent two hours on the phone with Apple support and they acknowledged this is a problem but for some reason they don't seem in any hurry to fix it.
PhotoTakeout exports all the metadata correctly. To test I imported photographs back to Apple Photos to check.
I see from other reviews some people had a problem with specifying the source directory. I initially had the same issue but figured it out and sent in a support email to flag the problem. This was on a Sunday afternoon. Sunday evening I got a very good reply explaining the issue with Big Sur permissions. Customer support is excellent!
App Privacy
The developer, App Initio Limited, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy.
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- App Initio Limited
- Size
- 8 MB
- Category
- Utilities
- Compatibility
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- Mac
- Requires macOS 10.12 or later.
- Languages
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English
- Age Rating
- 4+
- Copyright
- © 2020 App Initio Limited
- Price
- Free
- In-App Purchases
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- Pro Power $49.99
- Power $12.99
- Power Up $36.99
Supports
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Family Sharing
Some in‑app purchases, including subscriptions, may be shareable with your family group when Family Sharing is enabled.