Photo Export

macOS utility for exporting photos from Apple Photos.

Note: This project has been archived and will not be developed further. It was a great opportunity for me to learn about SwiftUI and was the primary way I published photos to my website for quite a while, but it no longer makes sense to maintain it. I still hope to revisit the problem of backing up iCloud Photo Library data in the future, but 'Photo Export' isn't the right tool for that.

Development

Managing Certificates

The build script (details below) uses Fastlane's match task to manage a certificates and a local keychain. Unfortunately, match seems very buggy when using Developer ID certificates, meaning it can't safely be used to fetch the certificates from Apple (it will keep creating new developer certificates until you reach your quota).

Instead, you can manually import a manually created certificate and private keychain into an existing match certificate store:

fastlane match import --skip_certificate_matching true --type developer_id

Match will ask for the path to your certificate (.cer) and private key file (.p12).

N.B. When manually importing certificates, match will not generate file names with identifiers so it's a good idea to name the certificate and private key with a matching, and obvious name.

Builds

In order to make continuous integration easy the scripts/build.sh script builds the full project, including submitting the macOS app for notarization. In order to run this script (noting that you probably don't want to use it for regular development cycles), you'll need to configure your environment accordingly, by setting the following environment variables:

• MATCH_PASSWORD -- the password/passphrase to secure the match certificate store
• CERTIFICATE_REPOSITORY -- the repository used for the match certificate store (must be HTTPS)
• CERTIFICATE_REPOSITORY_AUTHORIZATION_KEY -- a GitHub authorization key used to access the certificate repository (see the match authorization docs)
• APPLE_DEVELOPER_ID -- individual Apple Developer Account ID (used for notarization)
• FASTLANE_APPLE_APPLICATION_SPECIFIC_PASSWORD -- app-specific password for the Developer Account
• NOTARIZE -- boolean indicating whether to attempt notarize the build (conditionally set based on the current branch using ${{ github.ref == 'refs/heads/main' }})
• TRY_RELEASE -- boolean indicating whether to attempt a release (conditionally set based on the current branch using ${{ github.ref == 'refs/heads/main' }})
• GITHUB_TOKEN -- GitHub token used to create the release

The script (like Fastlane) will look for and source an environment file in the Fastlane directory (Fastlane/.env) which you can add your local details to. This file is, of course, in .gitignore. For example,

# Certificate store
export MATCH_PASSWORD=
export CERTIFICATE_REPOSITORY=
export CERTIFICATE_REPOSITORY_AUTHORIZATION_KEY=

# Developer account
export APPLE_DEVELOPER_ID=
export FASTLANE_APPLE_APPLICATION_SPECIFIC_PASSWORD=

# GitHub (only required if publishing releases locally)
export GITHUB_TOKEN=

You can generate your GitHub authorization key (for CERTIFICATE_REPOSITORY_AUTHORIZATION_KEY) as follows:

echo -n your_github_username:your_personal_access_token | base64

Once you've added your environment variables to this, run the script from the root of the project directory as follows:

./scripts/build.sh

You can notarize local builds by specifying the --notarize parameter:

./scripts/build.sh --notarize

You can publish a build locally by specifying the --release parameter:

./scripts/build.sh --release

Licensing

Photo Export is licensed under the MIT License (see LICENSE).