Decided to copy decades of digital photos from Photos (nee iPhoto) to NAS. If your client doesn’t decode and your server doesn’t transcode HEIC then you’ll need to convert HEIC image files. Unlike iPhoto, Photos makes the task of exporting the library in a sane manner with keywords intact unnecessarily impossible, or nearly so. Turns out some brave person created a Python script, osxphotos, to accomplish that task. It’s certainly robust and installation failed for me using Mac Ports (likely due to the age of my system and plenty of outdated deps and other crud from unmaintained packages). But I digress. The instructions for ‘pip’ worked no sweat.

This particular script doesn’t rely on osxphotos, but it does use heif-dec which is provided by libheif. Where I got that, I don’t know. I initially was going to try imagemagick but that also would not install from Mac Ports (c’mon guys). Could be re-written to use imagemagick I’m sure, so long as it can decode HEIC.

#!/bin/bash
# We are working here. Please be sure to cd to the proper dir as there is no prompt for assurance!
here=`pwd`

# Quality level of jpg output. You can adjust from stdin, though there is no check against it.
qlvl=90
if [ $1 ]; then
qlvl=$1
fi

# Originals HEIC image files will be moved here (prefixed with their 'Create Date').
origs=$here/heic-originals
if [ ! -d $origs ]; then
mkdir $here/heic-originals
fi

# Start the loop. Find all files with 'HEIC' extension.
for i in $(find $here -type f -path "*.HEIC") 
do
filename=$(basename $i)
_ext=${filename##*.}
_name=${filename%.*}
_dir=$(dirname $i)
# Name of new jpg file. Unless...
_newf=$_dir/$_name.jpg
# If a jpg with the same name exists, I guess salt the new one with what happened.
if [ -f $_newf ]; then
_newf=$_dir/$_name-heic2.jpg
fi
# Get Create Date to add to original filename when it is mv'd to Originals directory.
odate=$(exiftool -s3 -d %Y%m%d -CreateDate $i)

# Let's test it first. For sanity, maybe cd to a directory with only a few HEIC files to test.
echo "heif-dec -q $qlvl $i $_newf && mv $i $origs/$odate-$_name.$_ext" >> $here/test-run.txt
# Satisfied? Swap the comment below and above.
#heif-dec -q $qlvl $i $_newf && mv $i $origs/$odate-$_name.$_ext

# Done.
done