Some video formats aren't recognised properly by MacOS Photos and cannot be imported. Other times, videos might be missing key metadata that the Photos app uses to determine the capture date. This tool helps to fix that.

You must have Python3.5 or later installed locally. You can install it using Homebrew:

$ brew install python

Make sure the version is correct by running:

$ python --version

You must also have ffmpeg installed:

$ brew install ffmpeg

Create a directory named input and copy all the video files you are having trouble with there. Then run the following command:

$ python main.py

The tool will then start processing and converting all the video files to mp4 and set the creation and modification dates as the capture dates for the video.

Once the script is done processing the videos, you can import them into the Photos app from the output directory.

I put this script together after spending hours trying to download and import photos and videos from Google Photos into Apple's Photos app on MacOS. Over the years, I had accumulated videos in all sorts of formats (3gp, mov, mpg, mpeg, avi, mp4, mts, wmv, etc.) from all sorts of devices (Android phones, iPhones, digital cameras, DSLRs, GoPro, and even Hi8 camcorders).

The first issue I noticed is that a lot of the older files would get imported using the import date as the capture date, even though the file's creation and modification dates were set to years ago.

The second issue was that several file formats were unreadable to the Photos app. This was true for almost all AVI, MTS, and WMV files.

ffmpeg will do its best to preserve the video size and quality in the exported files. However, you will notice a reduction in file size especially when converting from avi to mp4. This is normal and personally, I can't tell if there is any drop in quality.

• Giacomo1968 and drfrogsplat for the tip on changing the pixel format on stubborn videos.
• Stefan Barthel's photos-date-fixer script, which didn't solve the issues I had but made me believe that I could script it myself.