For this project I wanted a consistent file format for my entire collection.
I have a bunch of stuff I want to save which is behind paywalls/logins/clickthroughs that are tricky for wget to reach. I know I can hand wget a cookies file, but that’s mildly fiddly. I save those pages as Safari webarchive files, and then they can drop in alongside the files I’ve collected programatically. Then I can deal with all my saved pages as a homogeneous set, rather than being split into two formats.
Plus I couldn't find anybody who'd done this, and it was fun :D
This is only for personal stuff where I know I'll be using Safari/macOS for the foreseeable future. I don't envisage using this for anything professional, or a shared archive -- you're right that a less proprietary format would be better in those contexts. I think I'm in a bit of a niche here.
(I'm honestly surprised this is on the front page; I didn't think anybody else would be that interested.)
2/ Proprietary format: it is, but before I started I did some experiments to see what's actually inside. It's a binary plist and I can recover all the underlying HTML/CSS/JS files with Python, so I'm not totally hosed if Safari goes away.
Yeah, that was what I thought when I first worked with these APIs! But when you use PhotoKit, you have to explicitly opt-in to downloading files from iCloud.
AFAICT, PHAsset is only metadata. When I'm downloading the full-sized images, I use PHImageManager.requestImage() and pass in the PHAsset I'm looking at [1][2]. I know there's something similar for video, but I've never used it.
You can control the behaviour by passing a PHImageRequestOptions instance. This includes an isNetworkAccessAllowed bool which controls where Photos.app will download the file from iCloud if not present locally, and it defaults to false.
> I think that all "photos" or "videos" are just a view of the underlying "photo or video object". If you crop a video, the full-size video will remain. Only if you export the video, it will be cropped and the smaller file size will manifest.
Yup, the Photos app keeps the unmodified original file, and then any edits/crops are stored separately. You can always revert to the original file and redo your edits. So they might be storing multiple copies of the same image, with and without edits.
Which API were you looking at for "file size"?
I was able to get the size data from Photos.app with the PhotoKit API [1]. I've only tested it with my library of ~26k items, but it was useful for getting an indicator of the biggest items. (Although I didn't think to check whether exporting a 1GB video caused my iCloud usage to drop by 1GB.)
I passed 400 posts a month or so ago; been writing for about a decade. It's a mix of programming, arty stuff, digital preservation, personal thoughts – the first link describes the sort of writing I do, and examples of each.
For this project I wanted a consistent file format for my entire collection.
I have a bunch of stuff I want to save which is behind paywalls/logins/clickthroughs that are tricky for wget to reach. I know I can hand wget a cookies file, but that’s mildly fiddly. I save those pages as Safari webarchive files, and then they can drop in alongside the files I’ve collected programatically. Then I can deal with all my saved pages as a homogeneous set, rather than being split into two formats.
Plus I couldn't find anybody who'd done this, and it was fun :D
This is only for personal stuff where I know I'll be using Safari/macOS for the foreseeable future. I don't envisage using this for anything professional, or a shared archive -- you're right that a less proprietary format would be better in those contexts. I think I'm in a bit of a niche here.
(I'm honestly surprised this is on the front page; I didn't think anybody else would be that interested.)
2/ Proprietary format: it is, but before I started I did some experiments to see what's actually inside. It's a binary plist and I can recover all the underlying HTML/CSS/JS files with Python, so I'm not totally hosed if Safari goes away.
Notes on that here: https://alexwlchan.net/til/2024/whats-inside-safari-webarchi...