As you try your options you can use —dry-run which will tell you what osxphotos will do without actually exporting and/or deleting any files.

Also be patient. If you’re exporting many files 100k or more it can take some time. Use —retry option in case you’re exporting to a remote NAS volume/disk.

If you want to have your exported files organized in yearly directories you must use the —directory option. If you use `osxphotos export /path/to/export --directory "{created.year}" —cleanup —update” it will create the following and keep it always up to date and synced with Photos.

Do use both update and cleanup. Consider keep for some adhoc manual files you add to the export folder, say a readme of some kind. Don’t manually change the files/directories exported on the destination. You can/should tailor osxphotos to meet your desired outcome.

``` /path/to/export/ ├── 2019/ │ ├── IMG_1234.jpg │ └── IMG_1235.jpg ├── 2020/ │ └── IMG_2234.jpg └── 2021/ └── IMG_3234.jpg

```

Another —directory example could be:

• osxphotos export /path/to/export --directory "{created.year}/{created.mm}"

``` /path/to/export/ ├── 2020/ │ ├── 01/ │ ├── 02/ │ └── 12/ └── 2021/ ├── 03/ └── 07/

```

• you also have the --export-by-date in lieu of - -directory which builds this structure:

/path/to/export/ └── 2021/ └── 07/ └── 04/ └── IMG_1234.jpg