Eaton
So, if you're a MacOS user and you ever feel the need to get some raw stats about the photos you've taken and stored in your iCloud photo library, there's a (fairly) easy way to dig in.
iPhoto's metadata lives in a giant sqlite database, and you can just… query it. Unless you've moved it, it lives at `~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/database/Photos.sqlite`, and quite a bit of interesting stuff is in the ZEXTENDEDATTRIBUTES table.
Eaton
Some useful notes — iPhoto stores its dates as the number of seconds from Jan 01 2001; dates earlier than that are stored as negative numbers. Adding 978307260 to its stored dates will let you treat them as UNIX timestamps, much easier to convert in various scripts.
Eaton
For the *exceptionally* nerdy, this also makes it easy to figure out when you changed phones…
Eaton
@Myerman give me anything in a SQL database AND I’m a happy man :D
merciless Indian savage
@eaton cool!
Eaton
More fun facts: iPhoto also has a table full of precomputed photo attributes based on its image recognition algorithms: Every photo gets a ‘PLEASANTREFLECTION’ score, a ‘TASTEFULLYBLURRED’ score, a ‘HARMONOUSCOLORS’ score, and so on. They're stored in the ZCOMPUTEDATTRIBUTES table, FWIW — and every one of its metadata tables shares the Z_PK property for joins.
Eaton
It makes sense — iPhoto occasionally spits out “Photos of friends you traveled with!” and “Portraits of your pets!” etc. By combining face/subject recognition data with location data, it can get a pool of photos to work with. Precomputed rankings for "composition" and "color balance" and so on would make it easier to build attractive galleries.
Eaton
@beep Riiiiiiight?
Ethan Marcotte
@eaton ohhhhhh *fascinating*
Eaton
@lewiscowles1986 I mean, tbf this is one of the least worst things I’ve seen in tech. It’s obviously being done locally and used to auto-curate aesthetically pleasing albums, not sell ads or foment genocide or something. I figure that’s a job for Apple News.
Lewis Cowles
@eaton
s/fun facts/crimes against users/gmi
Eaton
@lewiscowles1986 if they can figure out how to sell the fact that my photo of a pinecone on April 8th 2011 was tastefully blurred, all I can say is, good hustle
Lewis Cowles
@eaton
first they attribute the data locally, unbeknownst to users, then they gradually roll-out more "features".
Apple sells user data, they just publicly make a lot of noise about how they try to stop anyone else doing the same.
Eaton
@lewiscowles1986 they manufacture my phone; if they’re selling my geodata they absolutely don’t have to backdoor it through local photo tagging saved locally in an open data format..
Lewis Cowles
@eaton
comical, sure; but likely ignoring that they might get location data; interest data, and with interests companies can jack up the cost of the things you like doing.
There are a million ways folks under-estimate the future value of present and historical data
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.