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Comment by _trampeltier | Hacker News Reader

Consumer PCs these days make it hard. There are so many (really terrible) tools on these Computers. Ex. last month I asked a friend (a very not computer guy), if he could give me some pictures from an event last summer. I gave him an USB drive. Next day he came and asked for help to copy the files. We saw the pictures in his Photo App. Of course it was NOT possible to copy the files from this App. I had no idea where they where on his PC. Even for me it was finally difficult just to copy some files on his new Win 10 PC.

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Everyone else is talking about Apple, but I thought you were talking about Windows, because I had the same problem: the Metro Photos app likes to store things in AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.Windows.Photos_8wekyb3d8bbwe (!)

> the Metro Photos app likes to store things in (AppData)

I think that might be a bug. Windows 10 Photos app is surprisingly good about exposing your file system nicely, without the jank of a 'private proprietary hidden library' that other photo apps sometimes use.

Right click any photo to "Show in File Explorer" directly, or click Settings and it will show you a list of "Source Folders" it scans for pictures. Double click any "Source Folder" to jump straight into it.

At least, that's all present in the current version of Photos (2018 v18081.14710)

Oh yeah, Apple is being very difficult with this app; stashing all photos in a not easily accessed folder structure, and basically pushing people to preferring sharing via icloud over just the files.

You can literally drag them from the Photos app to your usb drive, my dude…

But not into e.g. the terminal. Apple Photos is useful, but it absolutely mucked up the idea of pictures as files (it has to.)

You can drag images from Photos directly into the terminal and they will drop as a path to the image you dragged. If you drag a thumbnail, you get a path to the thumbnail; if you drag a full-resolution image, you get a path to that.

That's pretty much how I would expect an app like this to work on a Mac!

> You can drag images from Photos directly into the terminal and they will drop as a path to the image you dragged. If you drag a thumbnail, you get a path to the thumbnail; if you drag a full-resolution image, you get a path to that.

Really? What if you want to copy a group of images? If what you describe is correct, when you drag and drop a group of images, wouldn't you get copies of the thumbnails.

I'm pretty sure my GF did this. I asked her for full res copies of some images of us, and got resized low-res versions. She uses iPhoto said she just dragged them out of the app. I had to fuss around with it and finally got what I wanted by using an export feature.

Dragging and dropping each full-resolution images one by one sounds like a nightmare.

> That's pretty much how I would expect an app like this to work on a Mac!

If this is what's now expected from Macs, oh how Apple has fallen. I can think of zero use cases where you'd actually want to drag and drop the thumbnail out, but not the full resolution image.

I think you misunderstood. If you're dragging thumbnails onto a flash drive, it'll copy the source photos, not copies of the thumbnails. The terminal example is thumbnails or full photos since the files themselves can't be used by the terminal. You have to specify whether you want it to pull a location for the thumbnail or the full photo. In that instance, you wouldn't be using multiple files because there's no use case for a terminal where sequential files would be used without some kind of additional characters or arguments.

As the other person has pointed out that you can easily drag/drop, in macOS you can usually find the paths by right clicking and going to some ‘info’ part.

Having not touched windows for almost a decade and getting told I had to use a windows 10 laptop to work on... well

Frustration.

That said the performance of the OS is pretty good. When I learned Powershell wasnt available at cmd things got a bit better.

Ended up with a Linux VM simply because I dont have time to figure out how to reproduce simple Linux CLI commands on windows.

Every consider trying WSL? It's built into windows and gives you a full linux shell

Thanks. I will look into this when I get a chance. I am sort of hoping to convince people I dont need windows.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10

That's like Google using .webp to serve photos on some of it's sites. Great, now I have to teach someone else to find the download button to get a jpeg.

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