Regular Expressions --regex

[oPromessa]

Awesome tool! Many Kudos @RhetTbull

I'm moving from iPhoto into Photos with about 80k referenced files... Photos is not able to find/locate several referenced files while it does others. But I digress! Hope I can get out on the other side. ;)

I'm testing out osxphotos to regularly update an export folder from Photos. One (maybe) issue and one question came up:

1. I don't seem to to get --regex to work to select multiple albums. From the command below ii only selects pics from the last mentioned regex, that is "1992-08-12" album folder. Am I doing something wrong?

   • --regex "2021-03-14 Home" "{folder_album}" --regex "2021-04-09" "{folder_album}" --regex "2019-07-12" "{folder_album}" --regex "1992-08-12" "{folder_album}"
   • The Readme does mention:

     • "You may specify more than one regular expression match by repeating '--regex' with different arguments."

2. What regular expressions does the --regex parameter accept (the full spectrum)? I was trying out thinks like "2020-[01][09]" and other more complex options but they do not seem to work!

   • UPDATE: User error! Was able to make it work with one single regex like this --regex "2021-03-14 Home|2021-04-09|1992-08-12|2019-07-12" "{folder_album}"

Again, excellent tool. Thanks!

[RhetTbull]

Glad you find osxphotos useful!

--regex should work as used in your first example. It accepts any valid python regex expression. I'll take a look at the code to see why only the last pattern was matching.

[RhetTbull]

Yep, it's a bug...I'll open an issue and get it fixed. The results were being re-initialized between regexs which explains why only the last was working:

osxphotos/osxphotos/photosdb/photosdb.py

Line 3301 in 4a81e64

photo_list = []

[RhetTbull]

@oPromessa I can confirm you found a bug. It's now fixed in v0.42.92 so you can now use multiple --regex values and get the expected behavior.

Regarding your question on which regex syntax can be used, any valid python regex should work. You can specify case-insensitivity using the -i, --ignore-case flag. The example you gave "2020-[01][09]" may not do what you think it's doing. This says match 2020- followed by any character in the set {0,1} then any character in the set {0,9} so the following would match: 2020-00, 2020-09, 2020-10, 2020-19.