Bulk edit photos limitations? (and marking photos as hidden / not hidden)

[SaintDude]

I see osxphotos is able to access hidden photos, including hidden photos from a specific album, which is great. Example:
osxphotos query --hidden --album "MyHiddenAlbum01" --count

I would like to go one step further, and modify the "hidden" status for photos. Example: osxphotos batch-edit --hidden false

However, as I write this, I now see the batch-edit cmd currently requires the user to first select the target photos in Apple Photos, then run this command; there is no way to specify target photos directly within the command.

I'm curious as to the limitations you've found here...

• Is it not currently possible to edit photos outside of the official Apple apps? So for batch-edits, is osxphotos essentially impersonating the user to perform actions directly through Apple Photos?
• Despite the above, it IS possible to add specific photos to albums via commandline? Any idea why this is allowed, but editing the photos/metadata is blocked?

Said differently, what blockers prevent the below queries from being possible? Apple just doesn't allow these types of actions outside of their official apps?

• osxphotos query --query-eval "photo.score.overall < 0.2" --batch-edit --hidden=true
• osxphotos query --query-eval "photo.score.overall < 0.2" --batch-delete
• osxphotos query --query-eval "photo.score.overall < 0.2" --batch-edit --description “{place.name}”

I would love to help if I can. For me personally, the ability to update/modify/delete photos would bring this project from "occasionally useful" to "I use it daily!"

Related discussions I've found:

• 1725 - Delete image in Photos app
• 688 - Hidden photos

[RhetTbull]

osxphotos batch-edit currently only works on the selection as you've noted. The actual edits are performed via the Photos AppleScript interface (so osxphotos is effectively "driving" Photos to make the changes). This is the only officially supported way to do some of these changes. It does not currently supporting hiding or unhiding photos. It is possible to programmatically change the hidden status but Apple insists on prompting the user so you still get an annoying dialog box asking for confirmation. That can be worked around using some hacks but it's a pain.

I do plan to allow batch-edit to eventually be used without a current selection (see #1762 for example).

I will eventually add support for deleting assets but that's awaiting several other changes I am working on.

batch-edit can add photos via the command line and can edit metadata. Again the limitation on batch-edit working on the selection was a design choice to make it easier to select the photos to edit. I'll eventually add the ability to specify edits by album. I'm also considering adding the ability to specify photos to specify photos by UUID allowing you to chain a query and a batch-edit. Something like this:

osxphotos query --query-options --quiet --print {uuid} | osxphotos batch-edit --edit-options --uuid-from-file -

Said differently, what blockers prevent the below queries from being possible? Apple just doesn't allow these types of actions outside of their official apps?

I don't plan to add a --batch-edit option to query as I prefer to keep each CLI tool focused on one thing. But if I add the ability to chain them as above, that would work. Alternatively (or in addition), I could also add a --execute-function option or such that runs a python function on each filtered photo much like osxphotos export --post-function does for exported photos. Then you could have a function that does whatever edits you want and it would be passed the PhotoInfo object for each photo.