Why you can’t find your original Photos files

Glenn Fleishman, Macworld:

Photos, like iTunes and iMovie, doesn’t have a great way for you to access the media and other items that it manages, but there are some workarounds.

Apple gradually changed its app design to rely on library “files,” which are a special kind of folder, called a package. To the Finder, and for the purposes of copying and moving items, the library is a single folder. Inside, it contains all the sausage-making ingredients used by the apps, including original media files, modified ones (in the cases of Photos), project components, and one or more databases that track what’s inside the library.

Packages have been around forever. As Glenn says, this is a change in the way iPhoto and Photos stored their media.

Part of this is due to the nature of that media. Used to be, all photos produced a single jpeg. Over time, things got complicated, with live photos, bursts, undoable image editing, etc. Hard to not wrap that sausage making in a package.