Combining multiple templates

[RhetTbull]

On the r/osxphotos Reddit page, someone recently asked how to combine multiple templates for the --directory option so they could export to both YYYY/MM/DD and Folder/Album format. This wasn't possible without a custom template function. However, after thinking about this for a while I decided to add a new combine operator to the OSXPhotos Template Language spec to make this possible. To use it, you add &{template} immediately after the field name in your template. The result is the value(s) of the combined template are appended to the value(s) of the original template. This produces a multi-valued result so it can only be used in templates that can handle this (for example, --directory, --filename).

&combine_value: Template fields may be combined with another template statement to return multiple values. The combine_value is another template statement. For example, the template {created.year&{folder_album,}} would resolve to ["1999", "Vacation"] if the photo was created in 1999 and was in the album Vacation. Because the combine_value is a template statement, multiple templates may be combined together by nesting the combine operator: {template1&{template2&{template3,},},}. In this example, a null default value is used to prevent the default value from being combined if any of the nested templates does not resolve to a value.

For example, the template that works for the OP's question on Reddit is:

--directory "{var:folder_date,{created.year}/{created.mm}/{created.dd}}{%folder_date&{folder_album,}}"

This creates a new value (stored in a variable) called folder_date which is the date of the photo in YYYY/MM/DD format as you'd get with --export-by-date and then adds zero or more values for the folder/album for any folders/albums the photos is in.

This will result in duplicate exported copies so that's something to be aware of.

Edit: this is available in osxphotos v0.67.8.