Photos Takeout 4+

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.]

Good app, looking forward to more development/features

Photos Takeout is a very handy tool, and I applaud the developers for being super responsive, friendly and open to suggestion! The export options have gotten better over time...hopefully some of the minor quibbles, like how it keeps launching in full screen by default, will be dealt with soon. Overall, it does the job and from what I hear, they'll continue refining and adding features!

Developer Response ,

Hi. Shouldn't happen. Could you please email us for help? Please mention which version of macOS and the other details mentioned at the end of the in-app User Guide.

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!