CustomPhotoImporter

A simple app that I created to migrate my photos from Lightroom Classic to Apple's Photos.app.

This is optimised for my specific needs and the code is just barely good enough to do what I needed it to do. This was a one-time operation for me, so I have no intent to continue working on this app.

Why

The purpose of the app is to migrate both originals AND the adjusted versions of photos from Lightroom to Photos.

How

The app expects a file structure that looks something like this:

Lightroom Exports
├── Cape Town 2019
│   ├── DSC_0001.dng
│   ├── DSC_0002.dng
│   ├── DSC_0002.jpg
│   ├── DSC_0003-edit.jpg
│   ├── DSC_0003.dng
│   └── DSC_0004.dng
├── Copenhagen 2021
│   ├── DSC_0005.jpg
│   ├── DSC_0006-edit.jpg
│   └── DSC_0006.jpg
└── Some Other Album Name
    └── DSC_0007.jpg

• Lightroom Exports: the root of the photo exports from Lightroom
  • Cape Town 2019, Copenhagen 2021, and Some Other Album Name: the names of folders in Lightroom and will be created as albums in Photos.
    • DSC_0001.dng: an original, RAW photo exported as a DNG from Lightroom (without any adjustments or edits)
    • DSC_0002.dng + DSC_0002.jpg: an original RAW photo plus a JPEG export of all the adjustments and edits. These will be imported as a single photo into Photos (i.e. the original + the JPEG as the adjusted version)
    • DSC_0003.dng + DSC_0003-edit.jpg: also an original plus a JPEG export
    • DSC_0005.jpg + DSC_0005-edit.jpg: an original JPEG plus a JPEG export with edits and adjustments baked in

I used the jR Folder Publisher Lightroom to export my photos from Lightroom to a suitable folder structure.

Caveats

• Try the import with a small subset of photos first
• I recommend ensuring that all your photos have sane dates in their EXIF/metadata or else they'll appear incorrectly in the time-based views in Photos. In my case I had a few albums with scanned photos which I ended up re-importing after I updated their EXIF data to be at least approcimately correct.
• There's no deduping of photos at all. Running the import multiple times will results in duplicate images in Photos
• Each photo will show “Saved from CustomPhotoImporter” in the detail view:
  
• The imports aren't asynchronous so the app will appear to freeze while the import is happening