Where are Photo Booth image files stored in Lion?

Question

On Snow Leopard, photos taken with Photo Booth were stored in myuser/Pictures/Photo Booth. They were individual image files that could be opened with any image editor. After updating to Lion, when I go to myuser/Pictures, I see an icon for Photo Booth Library. When I double-click to open, it just opens Photo Booth with the thumbnail strip along the bottom.

Where are those image files stored now? The whole point of them is to be able to use them for avatars, etc. which I can't do if I can't get at the individual files.

Answer 1

They're stored in ~/Pictures/Photo Booth Library on Lion. This is a package though and you can't just double-click in to the package to see the sub-folders. Double clicking on it will, instead, open Photo Booth.

If you just want to get at the pictures, right-click (or control-click) on the Photo Booth Library package under ~/Pictures and select Show Package Contents from the menu.

Under the package directory you'll see a sub-directory called Pictures -- that's where Photo Booth is keeping your snaps. Change in to there to access the images directly.

From within Photo Booth you can also right-click (or control-click) on any image in the bottom bar and select 'Export...' or 'Reveal in Finder' from the pop-up menu to access the image. The former gives you a Save dialog that lets you place the image file in some easily accessible location. The latter opens up that Pictures directory in the package I mentioned above directly in a Finder window.

Answer 2

Just right-click on "Photo Booth Library" and select "Show Package Contents" your pictures should be in the "Pictures" folder.

Answer 3

in lion the folder 'Photo Booth Library' has some extended file attributes that will make you open photo booth rather than simply the folder. to access your files in the finder, eg. for using them in avatars or email attachments you need the terminal (Finder -> Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal) and have to go in the terminal to your Pictures folder by typing

cd Pictures/

now, you can either

• remove those extended file attributes (you'll need the developer tools for this) by typing

xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo Photo\ Booth\ Library/

this removes the nice icon of the folder (side-effect, sorry) and changes the behavior of finder so that it just opens that folder rather than opening the photo booth app.

• or make a symbolic link to the place where your pictures are stored in the library. In your Pictures folder do

ln -s Photo\ Booth\ Library/Pictures PhotoBoothPics

the link PhotoBoothPics will be accessible in your finder as you would expect from a standard directory.

For beginners, I recommend the second version. But maybe some expert can figure out which bit to unset in the finder info (rather than deleting the whole object).

Answer 4

Just Copy all your pictures from the package of Photo Booth Library package to a different location, then delete the Photo Booth Library package from the pictures directory

When you re-open Photo Booth app and it will ask you if you want to create a new Photo Booth Library package for your pictures and where you want to create it.