I’ve tried using Apple Photos but like you, I don’t like the way it re-catalogs the photos in its “Photos Library” folder structure. I want the photos organized in a folder structure that I have used for years (year > event_name > yr-mo-day-time-device.jpg) and I have Hazel re-name all the photos in that format to have a consistent naming convention across all my pix.
I think Apple Photos has an ability to work with/support whatever your folder structure is within Finder, but I believe it does not then let the photos sync with iCloud, which is kind of a show stopper and in my mind, defeats the purpose of using Apple Photos.
Photos are too important, even if Apple and iCloud are rock solid, to 100% put on someone else’s cloud service without having an archive of the actual photo files. I want to have the original photo images available and I want them organized the way I’m comfortable with. I am a firm believer that you need to own and control your own content.
I use Hazel and Dropbox heavily in my workflow to get photo image files from iPhones to my computer. I install Dropbox on my iPhone and turn on its “Camera Uploads” feature. I also install Dropbox on my iMac so my Dropbox folders are there too. In many ways, Dropbox is a ‘pass through’ while Hazel is a life-saver!
From there, the workflow is:
- Take Photos on iPhone
- On a regular basis, turn on Dropbox app on iPhone and Camera Upload feature uploads photos to that folder on Dropbox
- Then, on my iMac, I have Hazel programmed to look for images in that “Dropbox > Camera Uploads” folder on the computer.
- Hazel finds the photos uploaded to “Dropbox > Camera Uploads” and moves them to my ‘master_photos_files’ directory in Finder.
- Hazel drops those “new” photos in a folder named for the corresponding year (i.e. 2022 > to_be_filed) and then roughly once a month, I manually go to that ‘to_be_filed’ folder and move the photos into the folder of the event (i.e. “Trip to Washington DC”)
- I also have Hazel push copies of any new photos/folders in my master photos directory to my external Hard Drive, so that is an ongoing automatic back up of my 20+ years of photos.
Yeah, there is a little manual intervention at the end, but I’ve organized photos by ‘year > event name’ for so long, I could not fathom switching to organizing by month. And whenever I need to find a photo for myself or my wife, we usually remember it by an event vs a specific month. It is also an opportunity to edit/manage/remove useless photos or duplicates.
I loved the way the old Google/Picasa desktop app was flexible enough to work ‘on top’ of your folder structure and would not mess with whatever folder organization approach you use.