p.1 #1 · I made a free Mac app to import photos with naming rules
Hi, I'm a long-time fm user here, and I've been struggling with finding a tool on Mac OS to import photos from memory card with customizable file naming rules and copy verification. Windows has such app called Downloader Pro from Breeze Software. On Mac, many photo editing or browsing apps have import features, but they lack the level of customization I'm looking for. So I built the tool I wanted: renames from EXIF with unique auto-incremental sequence number, and SHA-256-verifies every copy. It's now up on Mac App Store:
p.1 #3 · I made a free Mac app to import photos with naming rules
schlotz wrote:
Kind of sounds similar to Photo Mechanic?
Thanks for the great information! I didn't know about this app before. Just gave a try with its free trial license, and confirmed that I still need my app. Not trying to persuade anyone to move over, and TBH Photo Mechanics has lots of complicated feature that I believe some users will reply on heavily, but below is my honest opinion about my preference:
- Photo Mechanic is hard to learn how to use, especially that the naming rules have no preview, so without doing several tests I don't know how my rules work, for example variable {month} has no leading "0", and I have to use {month0}. There's no variable {year} and I should use {year4} for 4 digits years.
- Photo Mechanic imports non photo files too, for example ".FIR" file from 5d4, and I can't find a way to not do that.
- Photo Mechanic can't import raw and video files into different folders and backup to difference folders. I needs that because I want to import just the raw folder to Lightroom.
- Sequence number doesn't sync between computers. If the user has one macbook for mobile work and one mac studio for at home work, and import photos to both, then the photo names could have conflicts using the same sequence number. My app will sync the latest sequence number across iCloud to avoid this.
- My app can do verification after copying to make sure the copy was completed without any data loss, this is an important peace of mind before automatically deleting files from memory card to free up space.
- Last but not least, my app is free with no ads and no data sharing, all source code is shared on github.com for anyone to verify that it doesn't do anything malicious. Photo Mechanic's monthly subscription price or one-time purchase are both too expensive for me.
p.1 #5 · I made a free Mac app to import photos with naming rules
Looks great and congratulations for producing and sharing such a great tool. On the back end it would be interesting to hear more about your journey in creating this app. Did you have any prior programming experience, what compelled you to create this app, how long did it take, etc.
p.1 #6 · I made a free Mac app to import photos with naming rules
armd wrote:
Looks great and congratulations for producing and sharing such a great tool. On the back end it would be interesting to hear more about your journey in creating this app. Did you have any prior programming experience, what compelled you to create this app, how long did it take, etc.
Thanks for your support! I started on this because after switching from Windows to Mac, I really missed the Downloader Pro app that is only available on Windows. I have coding experience but I never got time to learn the specific language to code for Apple apps. Now with AI coding tools I can skip that part and just tell AI what I want in human language, and AI will translate to machine language basically. In total it’s only several hours of chatting with AI, waiting for it to generate the code, testing the app and telling AI if there’s any bug. The AI I used is Claude Code. It’s very powerful and I would recommend anyone to try it if you have some workflow that you want to automate.
