Trick Apple Photos into letting you access your video files

I had an 11GB movie in Apple Photos (sync'd from my iPhone) and I wanted to upload it to YouTube (actually via AirDrop to another laptop first).

The "export" options in Apple Photos provided no visual indicator of what they were doing - as far as I could tell they were broken.

I wanted to deal with the actual file on disk. I figured out how to get access to that like so:

  1. Right click on the movie in Apple Photes
  2. Select Edit With -> QuickTime Player
  3. In QuickTime Player, command-click on the filename in the QuickTime window to get a list of folders
  4. Click on the parent folder of the file to get a Finder window

Now you can treat the .MOV like a regular file! Right click and AirDrop and suchlike should work fine.

The command-click menu in QuickTime should look like this:

IMG_7790.mov In a folder with a big complex UUID name In a folder called ExternalEditSessions In a folder called com.apple.Photos in a folder called private In a folder called Photos Library.photoslibrary

Then when I went to quit the Apple Photos app later it told me I had export jobs in progress, the jobs that I hadn't been able to see in the first place!

Created 2022-04-12T16:35:57-07:00 · Edit