Wednesday, April 12, 2023

Keyboard Shortcuts for Exporting From Photos.app

Ole Begemann:

  1. The Photos app on macOS doesn’t provide a keyboard shortcut for the Export Unmodified Original command.
  2. macOS allows you to add your own app-specific keyboard shortcuts via System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > App Shortcuts. You need to enter the exact spelling of the menu item you want to invoke.
  3. Photos renames the command depending on what’s selected: Export Unmodified Original For 1 Photo“ turns into ”… Originals For 2 Videos“ turns into “… For 3 Items” (for mixed selections), and so on. Argh!

So he wrote a shell script to add shortcuts for all the different numbers to the user defaults. I would have probably done this with GUI scripting and FastScripts or Keyboard Maestro, but this method doesn’t require any third-party software.

There’s a bug in Photos.app on macOS 13.2 (and at least some earlier versions). Custom keyboard shortcuts don’t work until you’ve opened the menu of the respective command at least once.

Previously:

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>I would have probably done this with GUI scripting and FastScripts or Keyboard Maestro

Keyboard Maestro allows you to use regex matches in the Select a Menu Item action (https://wiki.keyboardmaestro.com/action/Select_or_Show_a_Menu_Item) which lets you deal with such varying menu items.

>There’s a bug in Photos.app on macOS 13.2 (and at least some earlier versions). Custom keyboard shortcuts don’t work until you’ve opened the menu of the respective command at least once.

To work around this, you can use the Show a Menu variant of the same action to show the menu first, and then select from it.


As far as I can tell, this is a bug in several macOS programs / the OS itself — Ulysses also doesn't recognize remapped keyboard shortcuts until you make visible the option in the menu once by clicking on it.

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