[How-To] Export Images from Ember

Lounge
1

Hey everyone!

I’ve received a handful of emails wanting to know how to export images from Ember. We have no automated way of doing this and it’s a bit tedious - however, I got an idea and acted upon it. And it worked.

So, here’s the best way to export your photos and files from Ember.

Step One
Go to your hard drive > users > username (mine is Aaron). Press Command + J and select “Show Library Folder”:

kZ8lqg.jpeg1920×1080 338 KB

Step Two
The files are in .embersnap files so you’d have to extract your data one by one. Fortunately, I did some testing and figured out a way to do this easier. Download an app called Find Any File (trial version works fine).

Once downloaded, open it up and set your settings as follows:

AIjvAz.png1090×408 18.9 KB

Step Three
Find Any File App:
Under Find Items - Select “Inside Folder…”

Go to Users > User folder > Library > Group Containers > (search for Ember), select that folder > Ember Library > Snaps - now select “Open"

Step Four
Start searching for different file extensions. Search for “.psd”, “.jpg”, “.png” and so on.

Enter the file extension and select “find” - if anything is found, a window will appear (see results.jpg) - from here, you can drag all files into your desired folder on your Mac/hard drive.

I639j5.png1500×886 34.6 KB

Let me know if that helps, or if you need any assistance.

3 Likes
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Thank you so much for this walkthrough!

I’ll admit, I am very frustrated that there’s not a “proper” export tool that would do things like “export my library to a folder hierarchy where the titles of the items are the titles of the files” — I had a really meticulously-organized Ember library, and while I understand that a full-fidelity export (with tags and descriptions) wouldn’t really be feasible, I wish that were an option.

But! Given that there isn’t a “proper” export tool, I really appreciate that you’ve put together this walkthrough of how to recover my library so I can resurrect it elsewhere. It’s going to be a lot of work, so I may never actually get to it (my library has ~2000+ items) and that’s a shame - but at least the images will be viewable, etc.

Thank you very much for this write-up!

1 Like
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One issue that’s come up in this process - many images and assets have the same name as each other, e.g. Preview.png, and macOS only offers the options “Skip, Stop, or Replace” - not “Keep Both”, when dragging files out.

What did you do in these cases to keep all your files?

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Your welcome! Hope it helps!

You would select “keep both”, then manually have to replace the names of the files.

It’s a bit messy, but it saves your data.

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Hey! One more question for you — what alternative product(s) do you all think make decent alternatives to Ember? I’d like to find a native app to put these exported & extracted assets into.

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I still use Ember (local), so I’m probably not the best person to ask. :frowning:

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If I export images this way and re-import them back into Ember would it still keep all the tagging info? I enter a lot of tags into Ember.

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Also I don’t know why but all my files are called compositionedimage. As I try to copy the files over to another folder it won’t let me do it since they all have the same name.

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Hi Kip!

  1. I would say “no” since you’re grabbing the original file and not the file Ember creates with the additional tags, sorting info, etc.
  2. You should be able to drag them all and choose “keep all/both”, and they’ll be named differently by the system until you can sort that out.
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Ok, that’s a bummer about the tags. Somehow I was able to keep the tag info when I moved to version 2 on my laptop. It seems like there was some way to export files from Ember 1.8 to keep that information. Unfortunately RealMac has seemed to take all that information down.

Right now I might just go to the finder to access that files and hope that they come out with an update to Ember very soon that allows me to import all my data. Thanks for your help.

1 Like
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@Aaron Didn’t know there was a problem. I just select a batch of files I want and then just drag and drop them into a folder. They are of course pngs but there are tons of batch conversion progs to turn them into jpegs or whatever.

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@kpryce1 Me either - I guess it depends on how you/Ember named your files. Mine all have their original names