photostream

Photostream

Makes it easer to access photos from your Photo Stream on a Mac.

This probably requires you to activate the Photo Stream in your iCloud System Preferences.

Usage

To get going:

photostream start <directory>

This will start it syncing to the given directory. If you don't supply a directory, it will sync into $HOME/Pictures/Photo Stream.

photostream sync <directory>

This will perform a one-off sync. This is what gets run by the background job. Again, if you don't supply a directory, the default will be used.

photostream stop

This will stop the sync, and remove the background job. It won't, however, remove any of the linked files that it created. I'm afraid you'll need to do that yourself.

How does it work?

When Photo Stream is active, the pictures actually get downloaded to your Mac, but in a hard-to-navigate nested directory structure of hashes.

This tool just creates a new directory with hard links to all the files in that nested directory structure. It uses launchd to monitor when new photos appear and resyncs the directory any time a new photo appears on your computer.

We have to use hard links so that the Finder will display the image with a thumbnail.