Exporting Photos from Mac Photos app including People Names/faces

[mk313]

We recently had my parent's old photos scanned & imported into Photos. Every family member has one, but not everyone uses Photos or a Mac.

right now, we are going through & adding people's names/faces to my mom's copy of the photos. I was hoping we'd be able to export the photos while retaining that info (names/faces) but every way I've tried exporting the photos, that information gets stripped.

I'm trying to first export them to my Mac using Photos, but they don't even seem to be able to make that transition. Although ideally I'd like to be able to send them to my siblings who both use Windows & have those work as well, but for a start, I'd be happy if they just worked for my mom's computer to mine,

Anyone have any ideas on how to accomplish this?

Thanks in advance,

 

[TorbenIbsen]

I can't help with this myself. - But I took the heading from your post and copied it into a Google search. One of the results was this:

The Surprisingly Easy Way to Export Photos from Apple Photos - Organizing Photos

Photos Takeout is the app that makes exporting pictures from your Apple Photos library to your computer easy. Transfer photos with metadata in an organized

www.organizingphotos.net

I would do some Google searches to find detailed articles about your problem. You are not alone in this situation. But you can't rely solely on what answers you might get in here.

 

[mk313]

Thanks for the reply. I use bing for searches and get a different set of results. I didn't see that link in my search. When I did the search, one of the first results that came back was from an Apple Support Community question where an answer was provided that Faces is not a recognized type of metadata, so you can't export it that way.

From the article you linked it, it looks like that program exports metadata, but it doesn't make any mention of Faces. I was hoping that someone else had this issue in the past & found a way around it.

Thanks for the help. I'll keep looking, and maybe switch my search (for this problem at least) to google.

 

[Ruggy]

Yes, it's a real pain and I've written to Apple about it.
If you export to an external drive- an SD card that sort of thing-you get the option to 'include titles keywords and caption'.Theoretically then you should be able to import them and retain the info. That is, export from one machine and import into another but you must then keep copies on your machines and you can't use icloud

I don't believe it can export faces no. When you set up a new machine even if you use your old icloud account all the faces have gone so I think they must be only in the library on the machine.
You may be to export the library and give it to someone else. I know nothing about that I'm afraid but that may be a solution? NOTE: there is a file called library that keeps all this sort of thing indexed it doesn't mean you have to download the whole library of photos. If you go into photos>settings it will tell you where it is under 'general' and clicking on it should take you to it.

There may be a third part app but I too would love to know

They even give instructions on how you can use photos to collaborate but how useful is it to be able to collaborate if you can't use titles and keywords? It's a real weakness of photos when you use it like me for copying a documents.

 

[mk313]

Thanks Ruggy. I'll play around with that & see if I can export the photos that way.

Seems like this is much more complex than it needs to be.

 

[Brian33]

Are you a programmer/scripter/Terminal.app type person? I haven't used this tool, but osxPhotos (https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos) apparently can read the Photos database and extract the faces (osxphotos calls them persons) data from it:

OSXPhotos provides the ability to interact with and query Apple's Photos.app library on macOS. You can query the Photos library database — for example, file name, file path, and metadata such as keywords/tags, persons/faces, albums, etc. You can also easily export both the original and edited photos.

Exporting metadata with exported photos​

Photos tracks a tremendous amount of metadata associated with photos in the library such as keywords, faces and persons, reverse geolocation data, and image classification labels. Photos' native export capability does not preserve most of this metadata. osxphotos can, however, access and preserve almost all the metadata associated with photos. Using the free exiftool app, osxphotos can write metadata to exported photos. Follow the instructions on the exiftool website to install exiftool then you can use the --exiftool option to write metadata to exported photos:


osxphotos export /path/to/export --exiftool


This will write basic metadata such as keywords, persons, and GPS location to the exported files.

So, if this works, each exported photo woud contain a tag which indicated the "faces" (person) name -- thus the information would be preserved with the photo. It could then be read by a variety of command-line and GUI apps (probably including some other image-display apps), BUT you couldn't just import it into macOS Photos.app and have the Faces data re-created. Photos.app just doesn't expect the data to be embedded inside the image file in that way.

Not sure if that helps at all, but it's nice to know that it is (apparently) possible to extract the Photos.app's special metadata. One could write a little script to print out a list of all images for each Face (person) tag, for example. Not really what you want, though.

I'd be happy if they just worked for my mom's computer to mine

You can copy your Mom's Photos library over to your computer. I don't know if it's possible to merge it with your own Photos library, or if that's wise to do. But, Photos.app does work with multiple Photos libraries -- you can open one at a time by holding the Option key while you click on Photos, and then select the library you want to open.

Each Mac user could open and browse your Mom's library in this way.

 

[mk313]

Are you a programmer/scripter/Terminal.app type person? I haven't used this tool, but osxPhotos (https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos) apparently can read the Photos database and extract the faces (osxphotos calls them persons) data from it:





So, if this works, each exported photo woud contain a tag which indicated the "faces" (person) name -- thus the information would be preserved with the photo. It could then be read by a variety of command-line and GUI apps (probably including some other image-display apps), BUT you couldn't just import it into macOS Photos.app and have the Faces data re-created. Photos.app just doesn't expect the data to be embedded inside the image file in that way.

Not sure if that helps at all, but it's nice to know that it is (apparently) possible to extract the Photos.app's special metadata. One could write a little script to print out a list of all images for each Face (person) tag, for example. Not really what you want, though.



You can copy your Mom's Photos library over to your computer. I don't know if it's possible to merge it with your own Photos library, or if that's wise to do. But, Photos.app does work with multiple Photos libraries -- you can open one at a time by holding the Option key while you click on Photos, and then select the library you want to open.

Each Mac user could open and browse your Mom's library in this way.

Thank you. I'm not really a programer, but I may give it a shot. It can't hurt, as it would be a backup copy of the database, so worst case is I'm not better off than I am now.

Also, thanks for the tip on the multiple Photos Libraries. That might be the best way to go, if I can't get the coding thing working (and nothing else comes along). At least this would preserve the data & the people in them.

Thanks a lot of the detailed options. Helps me a lot.

 

[RhetTbull]

I'm the author of osxphotos --let me know if you have any questions. Photos does not provide a way to copy persons (faces) from one library to another. Even other tools like PowerPhotos cannot copy persons. What osxphotos can do though is to export the person names as keywords or into the description of the exported photo then when you re-import those photos into Photos at least the person name will be searchable. I'm not aware of any way to preserve the actual face rectangles and associated person names when moving from one library to another (though osxphotos is able to export this info for use in other programs). As others have stated, using a separate library might be a good way to go but that's only useful for people who use a Mac.

If you want to try to use osxphotos, check out the tutorial. The following commands might help you get started:

Export photos while setting keyword to the person name (assumes you're exporting to ~/Desktop/export)

osxphotos export ~/Desktop/export --exiftool --keyword-template "{person}" --export-by-date

Then on the other computer, create a new library (hold down Option while starting Photos) and run this command to import the photos while creating new albums for each person to easily find photos that contain a person. The keyword of the imported photos will also be set to the person's name:

osxphotos import ~/Desktop/export/* --walk --album "{exiftool:XMP:PersonInImage}"

 

[mk313]

Thanks Rhet! I'm actually waiting for a last batch of photos to come in (we've gotten 2 out of 3 back so far) but once they do & I have a complete set of photos, I will definitely use this. I think that using a separate library will be best or myself, but using osxphotos to create the keywords would be my best possible outcome at this point for those that use Windows. I appreciate the help

 

[RhetTbull]

Thanks Rhet! I'm actually waiting for a last batch of photos to come in (we've gotten 2 out of 3 back so far) but once they do & I have a complete set of photos, I will definitely use this. I think that using a separate library will be best or myself, but using osxphotos to create the keywords would be my best possible outcome at this point for those that use Windows. I appreciate the help

For maximum preservation of metadata, you can add

--sidecar XMP

to the export command and it will also export a sidecar file for each photo in XMP format (extensible metadata platform) that can be read by many apps like Lightroom and DigiKam. This file will contain all the metadata, including the face regions and person names, for the photo.

 

[mk313]

For maximum preservation of metadata, you can add

--sidecar XMP

to the export command and it will also export a sidecar file for each photo in XMP format (extensible metadata platform) that can be read by many apps like Lightroom and DigiKam. This file will contain all the metadata, including the face regions and person names, for the photo.

Fantastic, thanks!