Exporting from photos destroys metadata!

[vjaaan]

I have just spent weeks uploading photos that I exported from Apple's photos program to google photos. Only to find out that all of the dates and critical information were removed from all of my 20,000 photos when I exported them so they could be used else where. I trusted apples iphotos program when I first took all of these pictures and let them go into the iPhoto program. But now I need those photos elsewhere, and it has destroyed all of the meaningful information.

How in the world am I to get that information back when I export those photos for other uses? I would have gladly uploaded all of my photos to Apple's iCloud photo library, but I did not want even optimized versions of all those photos dumped back on my phone and iPad. So I finally chose google photos and Google drive. But now I find my photos are worthless. Everything is jumbled because apples photo program stripped them their of dates and important information.

How can I export those photos from the apples photo program and keep all of that important information with the photo for other uses?

 

[InsideTJ]

I do a monthly export of the previous month's photos/videos (unmodified originals) for archival purposes. I just checked the exported photos, and the metadata seems fine.

 

[vjaaan]

I do a monthly export of the previous month's photos/videos (unmodified originals) for archival purposes. I just checked the exported photos, and the metadata seems fine.

Thanks for the reply. I've noticed that many of my photos exported fine, but then there were a whole bunch of them that were stripped of their original date. I also exported them as original file the same way. I am going to try and isolate all of the bad ones and I guess I'm going to have to delete them all and do it again.

 

[ApfelKuchen]

The metadata is still present in Photos. Therefore, the data has not been "destroyed." It's more accurate to say, "Stripped upon export." One justification for doing that is that people might inadvertently export personal information to public web sites. That's why there's a preference in Photos > Preferences to allow/disallow the export of location metadata. It's not necessarily a good idea to publish GPS location data when you post photos of a child's birthday party.

 

[InsideTJ]

The metadata is still present in Photos. Therefore, the data has not been "destroyed." It's more accurate to say, "Stripped upon export." One justification for doing that is that people might inadvertently export personal information to public web sites. That's why there's a preference in Photos > Preferences to allow/disallow the export of location metadata. It's not necessarily a good idea to publish GPS location data when you post photos of a child's birthday party.

I just checked that. i prefs I see a checkbox for:

metadata: include location information for published items.

Mine is unchecked (default). I would assume this refers to shared items, not exported items though. but I have not tested.

 

[ApfelKuchen]

I just checked that. i prefs I see a checkbox for:

metadata: include location information for published items.

Mine is unchecked (default). I would assume this refers to shared items, not exported items though. but I have not tested.

Yes, there's a different between Share and Export. The Export dialog includes the following options:

Info
Include: __ Title, Keywords, and Description
__ Location Information

I just tried an Export and a Share (to Mail) of the same iPhone image, with no metadata-related options selected. I opened both in Preview. I opened Preview's Inspector (Tools menu), and the same (full) Exif data was present in both, and the other data tabs also matched. (Captioning and GPS is not part of Exif.)

There is divergence when we look at Share vs. Export when all metadata-related options are enabled (both Photos > Preferences > Include location information for published items, and the Export options listed above). For the Shared image, Inspector > Info included tabs for General, Exif, JFIF, and TIFF. For the Exported image, there are also tabs for GPS and IPTC (IPTC has the keywords and captioning added via Photos).

So, overall, there should be no problems exporting all metadata when using Export. Share, however, still limits the data, though there are "save them from themselves" justifications for doing that.