OS X: Too slow copying videos from Photos App to another folder?

I make a variety of videos, and while the process changes slightly (depending on the type of content, and the audience it caters to), a lot of it is quite the same. Here’s a rough sequence of steps:

• Record video on my iPhone
• Import it to Photos App
• Copy it to another folder — say, ~/Desktop/snowpal/videos (by dragging and dropping it from Photos)
• Import it to Final Cut Pro
• Make the necessary edits
• Export it to ~/Desktop/snowpal/videos
• Publish it to LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.

That’s a lot of steps, and not many of them lend themselves to automation. However, the slowest step (the weakest link in the chain, if you will) is #3 where I copy it from Photos to another folder. It takes forever. While it could just be me, I can promise that I’ve seen this across OS X versions, and across my Mac machines. So, I want to say there is an Apple bug here.

Till Apple pushes a fix for this issue, here’s what you can do to expedite that step. Instead of manually dragging and dropping the video, try the approach below.

Photo by Gabriel Heinzer on Unsplash

• Open a Terminal window
• Run this command

ls -ltr ~/Pictures/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary/originals/**/* | tail -10

• Your photos and videos should be stored in the Pictures directory, and the command above will return the most recent 10 videos (change it to any number you like).
• It will return results along these lines:

-rw-------@ 1 snowpal  staff  3096288553 Mar  1 14:17 /Users/snowpal/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/originals/8/90A587AD-655B-4BAF-98DB-A69D85D2A8E0.mov
-rw-------@ 1 snowpal  staff  3026527903 Mar  1 14:25 /Users/snowpal/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/originals/9/8622D9FB-59A9-4426-A8C4-F5A8CE92BE20.mov

• Since we are only interested in the file name, we can tweak our command a bit to return only the name.

ls -ltr ~/Pictures/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary/originals/**/* | tail -10 | awk '{print $9 $10}'

• This will return:

/Users/snowpal/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/originals/8/90A587AD-655B-4BAF-98DB-A69D85D2A8E0.mov
/Users/snowpal/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/originals/9/8622D9FB-59A9-4426-A8C4-F5A8CE92BE20.mov

• Now, let’s copy this to our destination folder.

cp /Users/snowpal/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/originals/8/90A587AD-655B-4BAF-98DB-A69D85D2A8E0.mov ~/Desktop/snowpal/videos

• If you are wondering why we wouldn’t do this as part of the previous command, it’s simply because piping the results (aka, file name) to | xargs cp -t ~/Desktop/snowpal/videos doesn’t work on OS X (it should work in *nix distributions).

Now, you will notice that this copy takes literally no time. Of course, you can write a simple script to make this better, and to remove repetitive steps but the point here is that by taking this approach, we can save the insane amount of time it generally takes to complete that particular step.

#projectmanagement

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