I’m trying to understand whether this is intended behavior or simply very poor UX.
I’m using Photos on macOS. When I select a photo and click Info, Photos clearly shows a file size of several megabytes. If I then drag that same photo from Photos into Telegram and explicitly send it as a file/document (not as a compressed photo), the result is a completely different file. The JPEG that gets sent is much smaller, often around 500 KB instead of several MB, and it has an opaque, GUID-style filename such as 62D59C22-43D2-494B-B94D-3009C96FE6B1_1_102_o.jpeg.
So this is the same photo, on the same Mac, where Info shows one file size, but drag-and-drop produces a different file with a different size and a different name. There is no indication that this is a preview, a recompressed version, or anything other than the original file shown in Info.
Only after digging into how Photos actually works do you learn that Photos is a database rather than a file browser, that drag-and-drop often exports a derived JPEG instead of the original, and that the only reliable way to get the real original file is to use File → Export → Export Unmodified Original.
This is extremely unintuitive. Drag-and-drop is universally understood to mean “copy this file as-is.” In Photos, it actually means “hand the destination app some representation of this asset,” without any transparency about what representation that is. The filename change alone makes this feel broken, but the change in file size and quality is worse.
Am I missing a setting that forces drag-and-drop to always use the original file, or is this genuinely the intended design? Because if it is, it’s one of the most confusing and expectation-breaking behaviors I’ve encountered in macOS.
I’m using Photos on macOS. When I select a photo and click Info, Photos clearly shows a file size of several megabytes. If I then drag that same photo from Photos into Telegram and explicitly send it as a file/document (not as a compressed photo), the result is a completely different file. The JPEG that gets sent is much smaller, often around 500 KB instead of several MB, and it has an opaque, GUID-style filename such as 62D59C22-43D2-494B-B94D-3009C96FE6B1_1_102_o.jpeg.
So this is the same photo, on the same Mac, where Info shows one file size, but drag-and-drop produces a different file with a different size and a different name. There is no indication that this is a preview, a recompressed version, or anything other than the original file shown in Info.
Only after digging into how Photos actually works do you learn that Photos is a database rather than a file browser, that drag-and-drop often exports a derived JPEG instead of the original, and that the only reliable way to get the real original file is to use File → Export → Export Unmodified Original.
This is extremely unintuitive. Drag-and-drop is universally understood to mean “copy this file as-is.” In Photos, it actually means “hand the destination app some representation of this asset,” without any transparency about what representation that is. The filename change alone makes this feel broken, but the change in file size and quality is worse.
Am I missing a setting that forces drag-and-drop to always use the original file, or is this genuinely the intended design? Because if it is, it’s one of the most confusing and expectation-breaking behaviors I’ve encountered in macOS.
