Welcome to Ask Totally different. It’s possible you’ll be asking the flawed query so I am going to put up a solution in hopes it helps you with a solution. This complete subject would possibly belong on meta because you’re asking what seems to be an XY query.
Relatively than describe what you need to do – maybe you want to iterate over pictures to assemble statistics on that are new or maybe carry out some motion on some or all of them. As an alternative of that you’re asking about step one you suppose will make it easier to remedy it – “can I enumerate the pictures on the filesystem utilizing ls“?
However – let’s get you a solution. The Images app makes use of a considerably sophisticated database schema to retailer the filesystem areas (and names of pictures, faces, metadata, and so forth…) of pictures and determine them. You will have the sqlite3 command and to de-obfuscate the hashes and desk construction for most up-to-date variations of the app.
The database is saved in ~/Footage/Images Library.photoslibrary however utilizing these database recordsdata isn’t straightforward (to me at the very least).
Additionally, pictures are saved in a number of resolutions with machine-generated names – not picture0001.heic or no matter you would possibly anticipate whenever you export a picture. The “one picture” has a number of manifestations – thumbnails, edited, authentic, restricted decision, full decision – so your course of/instrument/script might want to ponder and resolve which if any of those are wanted. Not all pictures shall be resident regionally as effectively in case you are utilizing iCloud to host the authoritative copy of the images.
So, your downside is likely to be solved a lot simpler should you used a instrument like Automator to export the pictures to the filesystem after which use instruments like ls to do your operations.
