video-preflight

I store my processed photos and videos in Apple Photos so I can view them from anywhere on my phone or computer.

With video files, Apple Photos only parses metadata that's stored in QuickTime tags. Since video files straight out of my cameras don't store metadata in that format, the location, camera, and lens metadata doesn't show up if I put those files directly into Apple Photos. The files are also much too large to be reasonably portable or shareable.

This tool allows me to take a video file from my camera, make minor edits to it, compress it, and re-format the metadata -- a whole preflight pipeline for bringing video into Apple Photos.

It's a work in progress and is a big step forward in my knowledge of video metadata since my March 17, 2024 blog post entitled Working notes on EXIF tags for video files.

Setup

Prerequisites

As my primary use case is import into Apple Photos, this tool runs on macOS. I use Homebrew to install tools used by this utility.

It requires:

• Handbrake command-line interface for video compression
• ExifTool for metadata processing
• ffmpeg for remuxing, and in the future, audio replacement
• uv for installation

Install prerequisites.

1. Install Homebrew.
2. Install tools: brew install handbrake exiftool ffmpeg uv

Installation

Install the tool:

uv tool install --editable .

Ensure that the tool is on the PATH:

uv tool update-shell

Update

uv tool upgrade video-preflight

Use

Run any command with --help to see usage information.

Run the main pipeline via video-preflight run.

See video-preflight --help for other commands.