HN disclosure: I’m the author of Photos Backup Anywhere, but this thread mirrors the exact issues that pushed me to write it.
One thing that surprised me when digging into Apple Photos is how much state isn’t represented by just files-on-disk. Albums, Live Photos (paired assets), bursts, slo-mo, edits, and even “simple” things like adjusted capture dates are all tracked separately, and most export/backup tools end up flattening or partially reconstructing that on restore.
The approach I took was to treat Photos as the source of truth and verify restored items against it, rather than assuming filesystem metadata is enough. As far as I know, this is the only tool that restores albums and correctly round-trips all Photos item types while preserving location data, creation dates, and modification dates when restoring back into Photos.
Project page is here if it’s useful:
https://photosbackup.app/
Happy to explain details if anyone’s curious — there are a lot of sharp edges in Photos once you go beyond “export originals”.
One thing that surprised me when digging into Apple Photos is how much state isn’t represented by just files-on-disk. Albums, Live Photos (paired assets), bursts, slo-mo, edits, and even “simple” things like adjusted capture dates are all tracked separately, and most export/backup tools end up flattening or partially reconstructing that on restore.
The approach I took was to treat Photos as the source of truth and verify restored items against it, rather than assuming filesystem metadata is enough. As far as I know, this is the only tool that restores albums and correctly round-trips all Photos item types while preserving location data, creation dates, and modification dates when restoring back into Photos.
Project page is here if it’s useful: https://photosbackup.app/
Happy to explain details if anyone’s curious — there are a lot of sharp edges in Photos once you go beyond “export originals”.