> I created a shared photo album from a trip with friends. I want to filter it so I just see my friends' added photos (not mine), so I can pick and choose photos from the shared album to copy into my own photo library.
> Is there a way to do this?
As far as I know there is not. Apple does not provide a way to filter photos in shared albums using Smart Albums or any other means.
> Additionally, is there a setting that allows for the shared photos to retain location metadata and fully quality?
Not with shared albums. You can use the new iCloud shared library feature which does share the full resolution image, location, and some of the other metadata (but not albums). There's only 1 shared library though and it can be shared with a maximum of 6 people. Everyone in the shared library sees everyone else's shared photos.
Interestingly the information about who shared the photo is in the Photos library, Apple just doesn't expose this in a useful way.
I maintain a free open source tool called
osxphotos that can help and I wrote a script that osxphotos uses to import shared photos. It does involve several steps unfortunately:
1. Open Terminal.app
2. Install osxphotos using these
instructions
3. Download the script "import_shared.py" from
here and save it as "import_shared.py".
4. At the Terminal prompt, run `osxphotos install questionary` without the ` (backticks) (This installs a dependency needed by the script)
5. Run `osxphotos run import_shared.py` If you saved the script in your Downloads folder (default for the browser) you would run `osxphotos run ~/Downloads/import_shared.py`
The script will guide you through several questions:
- Which shared albums to import
- Which "owners" of the shared photos to ignore (select yourself in your case),
- Whether to create a new regular album with the same name as the shared album
- Whether to create another album which you specify to import the shared photos
- Whether to add keywords with the owner's name to the imported photos so you know in the future who's they are
- Whether to preserve any comments on the shared photos as part of the photos' description/caption
- Whether to mark as favorite any photos which had shared "likes" on them
The photos will then be imported and the metadata changes applied. This will take a bit of time as each photo is exported then re-imported as a regular photo one at a time.
It's not elegant but it works. I do plan to incorporate this as a regular feature of osxphotos so that you don't need to go through the extra install steps or download the script.
