Apple Photos Pano Stitching Workflow

[K Webster]

Hi there,

 

I came across your software mainly for the apple photos plugins - which I've tried and work great.  I really like them.

 

I have about 1.5tb worth of images stored in iCloud and for the most part apple photos has been my primary editor for the past little while, so ultimately all edited photos need to in there.  The plugins do a wonderful job of giving some extra functionality but the things I'm having some difficulty with are stitching pano's and hdr's.

 

The most ideal situation would be performing these functions in apple photos - but I don't think that's possible (anyone know of something that would add that functionality??).  So I can select my photos to stitch and edit them in affinity photo which quite happily opens a version of the images in affinity photo - however when going to the pano screen I can't select the opened photos it wants me to browse to select the images to use.  Since the images are in apple photos I can't exactly do this.  Exporting a temporary version of the images, importing them to affinity, making a pano, exporting that and then importing it back in to apple photos just seems like far more effort then its worth - and also leads to a lot of temporary versions of files that need to be maintained and removed.

[firstdefence]

Welcome to the forum, when opening the New Panorama... option and clicking Add in the window that pops up do you see an option for Media in the side bar, normally at the bottom of the sidebar and underneath Media it would say Photos, that's where you would access your images for the Panorama stitching.

[K Webster]

Exactly what I was looking for thanks!  I didn't see it before because it's at the bottom of a fairly long list.

 

Is exporting the resulting image and then importing it into photos the best way to get it back in?  Or is there a quicker way?

[firstdefence]

 

26 minutes ago, K Webster said:

Is exporting the resulting image and then importing it into photos the best way to get it back in?  Or is there a quicker way?

I don't know of an easier way than that I'm afraid. 

[h_d]

2 hours ago, K Webster said:

Is exporting the resulting image and then importing it into photos the best way to get it back in?  Or is there a quicker way?

 

With AppleScript or Automator, you can set up a Folder Action to monitor a drop folder and automatically import into Apple Photos any images that are added to the folder. I've tried it with images edited in Affinity Photo and then exported, and the exported file pops right into Apple Photos. It saves the pain of manually importing each image.

 

Post back if you're interested and I'll do my best to describe how it works.

[firstdefence]

2 hours ago, h_d said:

 

With AppleScript or Automator, you can set up a Folder Action to monitor a drop folder and automatically import into Apple Photos any images that are added to the folder. I've tried it with images edited in Affinity Photo and then exported, and the exported file pops right into Apple Photos. It saves the pain of manually importing each image.

 

Post back if you're interested and I'll do my best to describe how it works.

Sounds like a cool option a bit like smart folders but a bit smarter lol!

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, h_d said:

Post back if you're interested and I'll do my best to describe how it works.

I am curious about how your script adds the file to Photos.app. I assume this works for files exported from Affinity Photo to one of the formats that app accepts, which means an .afphoto file would not work, so is there any error checking or notification in your script to tell a user about that?

[h_d]

 

6 hours ago, R C-R said:

I am curious about how your script adds the file to Photos.app

 

 [Windows users stop reading here...]

 

 

 

With an AppleScript Folder Action, Photos itself throws an error and rejects non-importable files, just as would happen if you tried to import an .afphoto (or .eps etc) file manually.

The AppleScript as it stands is simply this:
 

on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving added_items

    tell application "Photos"

        activate

        import added_items with skip check duplicates --pull the file(s) into Photos

    end tell

end adding folder items to

 

 

 which is linked to a folder as a Folder Action. It could no doubt be improved on - for example by filtering acceptable file formats, and by adding commands to move the old file out of the drop folder to a "Processed" folder or the Trash.

 

With the Automator "Import Files into Photos" action, no obvious user error is generated. The file simply does not import.

 

The Automator Folder Action is just this:

 

 

and given Automator's lack of branching or error reporting it doesn't offer much scope for refinement.