I have EXACTLY the same problem. I edit my photos on the Mac then transfer to iPad for viewing. If I sync by wire the file name is replaced by "/", if I Airdrop then I get the file name (oddly all of my camera details for each shot are copied over fine). This has only started since I "upgraded" to iOS Monterey. Apple Tech support couldn't help. Very infuriating. When I have multiple versions of the same photo with minor subtle edits it's difficult to separate them on my iPad without the file name
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How come we still can't search by title/filename in Photos???
- Thread starter usagora
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I apologize if this has been answered, I just skimmed the thread.
Title and Caption search are a feature of iOS that I use quite often, if its not working for someone its a bug/glitch/setting somewhere. Thats a good thing though because that means it can be fixed.
As long as the photo stays in Apples photo library across devices you can maintain its 'title' and search from the photos app in iOS should be able to find it even though title IPTC metadata isn't shown in iOS's info shade. I mention that because sharing photos to a lot of sources will remove that data since it can be privacy sensitive.
This is an image of a picture taken with an iPhone, automatically uploaded to iCloud and sync'd to my Macs Photos app, title edited on the Mac, resync'd automatically back to the iPhone via iCloud. So basically I just edited a 'title' and iCloud did the rest...
MacOS screenshot, added "Test Pic" as the title.
iOS screenshot a minute or two later and searching "Test.." (Test Pic popped up prior to me typing it all out).
Its showing the correct photo using the title I added. Same thing when I add metadata in a photo editing program like GiMP or Photoshop and drop it back into Photos on the Mac. However things like Creator and Author aren't able to be searched via MacOS or iOS photo app. You can see them with 3rd party metadata viewers though.
All the "test" is metadata I entered, the description and title (not shown) can be successfully search in the Photos app.
While its not your issue I would recommend using Description in MacOS because its Caption in iOS. That means you'd be able to see and edit that metadata on both ends from the Photos app info shade on iOS. Just a recommendation vs using the Title tag that you can't see in iOS...
Apple takes all the photos and puts them into a package file (Photo.Library). The photos are given a GUID (unique identifier) as a file name for associating metadata with. There is a few databases that are also associated with that GUID for ecosystem stuff such as facial recognization data, live photo data, edit data of the original photo (photos aren't stored here just the data to create the edit on the fly), data for managing optimized storage, etc etc including standard metadata EXIF and IPTC.
Meanwhile Siri/Search (previously Spotlight on iOS) has a database of its own that is constantly indexing with new photo data so it can search for your request quickly.
There are a bunch of things that can be experimented with to try to find the issue. I think the first thing I would do is edit the caption of a photo in iOS. Give Siri a little while to index it and then try searching for that caption on the iPhone. This will just rule out whether Siri/Search is just blind and its not building its database or whatever.
You can verify the metadata is on iCloud.com by logging on there with the Mac and downloading a file with the title metadata to verify it. If its there then log on with the iPhone and download the same file to the Files app from iCloud.com in safari to bypass your Photo's app sync function. Then send it to your Photos app from Files and see if the metadata is there. If so try searching for it again.
If you establish its a sync'ing and/or database issue you can try turning off iCloud Photo Library on the iPhone. Download and delete all the photos. Turn it back on and let it re-sync. If you don't have enough space you could restore the iPhone so it removes and resyncs.
Title and Caption search are a feature of iOS that I use quite often, if its not working for someone its a bug/glitch/setting somewhere. Thats a good thing though because that means it can be fixed.
As long as the photo stays in Apples photo library across devices you can maintain its 'title' and search from the photos app in iOS should be able to find it even though title IPTC metadata isn't shown in iOS's info shade. I mention that because sharing photos to a lot of sources will remove that data since it can be privacy sensitive.
This is an image of a picture taken with an iPhone, automatically uploaded to iCloud and sync'd to my Macs Photos app, title edited on the Mac, resync'd automatically back to the iPhone via iCloud. So basically I just edited a 'title' and iCloud did the rest...
MacOS screenshot, added "Test Pic" as the title.
iOS screenshot a minute or two later and searching "Test.." (Test Pic popped up prior to me typing it all out).
Its showing the correct photo using the title I added. Same thing when I add metadata in a photo editing program like GiMP or Photoshop and drop it back into Photos on the Mac. However things like Creator and Author aren't able to be searched via MacOS or iOS photo app. You can see them with 3rd party metadata viewers though.
All the "test" is metadata I entered, the description and title (not shown) can be successfully search in the Photos app.
While its not your issue I would recommend using Description in MacOS because its Caption in iOS. That means you'd be able to see and edit that metadata on both ends from the Photos app info shade on iOS. Just a recommendation vs using the Title tag that you can't see in iOS...
Apple takes all the photos and puts them into a package file (Photo.Library). The photos are given a GUID (unique identifier) as a file name for associating metadata with. There is a few databases that are also associated with that GUID for ecosystem stuff such as facial recognization data, live photo data, edit data of the original photo (photos aren't stored here just the data to create the edit on the fly), data for managing optimized storage, etc etc including standard metadata EXIF and IPTC.
Meanwhile Siri/Search (previously Spotlight on iOS) has a database of its own that is constantly indexing with new photo data so it can search for your request quickly.
There are a bunch of things that can be experimented with to try to find the issue. I think the first thing I would do is edit the caption of a photo in iOS. Give Siri a little while to index it and then try searching for that caption on the iPhone. This will just rule out whether Siri/Search is just blind and its not building its database or whatever.
You can verify the metadata is on iCloud.com by logging on there with the Mac and downloading a file with the title metadata to verify it. If its there then log on with the iPhone and download the same file to the Files app from iCloud.com in safari to bypass your Photo's app sync function. Then send it to your Photos app from Files and see if the metadata is there. If so try searching for it again.
If you establish its a sync'ing and/or database issue you can try turning off iCloud Photo Library on the iPhone. Download and delete all the photos. Turn it back on and let it re-sync. If you don't have enough space you could restore the iPhone so it removes and resyncs.
EDIT: I should probably mention this just in case. The above was assuming you were using iCloud Photo Library. There is a lot of external metadata that won't sync with the original photo since its not original to the photo. You can export the latest version of the photo in MacOS photos using the normal export option and making sure you have this checked...
This is purely an issue when using a physical wire connection for photo transfer. Air dropping keeps the full file info. I don't want to use the cloud as my wi-fi is limited. Hopefully the problem will go with Ventura in the same way it arrived with Monterey
i had the same problem! google lets me search by title. I posted this to apple on twitter. if you have twitter can you support me and like it and retweet.mabye apple will hear us
The metadata for photos in the Mac OS Photos app contains the original file name so it should be available. This is just lazy coding.
Depends on what you want to do with the photos, but you can write a shortcut to find photos by name (or a substring in the name) that you can enter each time you use the shortcut. It’s not fast, though, so I have it only grab the last 200 photos and search those. I use this shortcut to find all photos with a word in their file name, show them to me, then gives me the option to put them in an album. Both the filename substring and the album to put them in are prompted from the user each time the shortcut is run. (Be aware: the search is case-sensitive and I don’t see an option to make it case-insensitive.)
It’s slow because a text string search is slow (which is probably why they don’t offer this feature already, they’d have to parse every filename, tokenize and index every word for it to be performant). But you can speed it up by adding extra filters *before* the Name search to narrow down how many photos it has to do the slow substring compare on. For example, if you know what album it’s in or the file extension or the size or anything like that that’s already in the metadata, then that will greatly speed it up. My shortcut above took about 10 seconds to search the most recent 200 images by name. Adding those pre-filters, I raised the number of photos searched to 500 and get a result within 2-3 seconds.
It’s slow because a text string search is slow (which is probably why they don’t offer this feature already, they’d have to parse every filename, tokenize and index every word for it to be performant). But you can speed it up by adding extra filters *before* the Name search to narrow down how many photos it has to do the slow substring compare on. For example, if you know what album it’s in or the file extension or the size or anything like that that’s already in the metadata, then that will greatly speed it up. My shortcut above took about 10 seconds to search the most recent 200 images by name. Adding those pre-filters, I raised the number of photos searched to 500 and get a result within 2-3 seconds.
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Well, if Apple would just index the photo library (including synced photos from Mac) on iPhone/iPad, then you could get instant search results just like in the Photos app for Mac. It's still mind-boggling to me that they overlooked this!
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Oh I agree, it frustrated me, too. I would rather NOT have to write my own shortcut to do this. But there’s a ton of stuff like that that frustrates me about Apple products. Simple quality of life things that they just don’t seem to care enough to do.
I'm coming in way late to the pary here but am I understanding correctly that if I name my photos in icloud, there is no way to search icloud by a photos given name or title? I assumed it would be like Google drive where you just entered a name and boom....up comes your *anything....literally before you can finish typing.
I'm sure someone else can give you a definitive answer, but I personally don't use iCloud for photos. They're strictly on my Mac and then synced to my iPhone. And my issue is that on my iPhone, none of the titles I've applied to these photos on my Mac are searchable on my iPhone.
Yes, Caption and description are used by both iOS and Mac OS photos, but Filename and Title are not used by iOS Photos. It is a weird omission.
Just wondering if the added metadata for Titles and Captions is held in the Photos database and not synced to the actual image file? If you look at the image file in Finder does it show the data? If not maybe there is a way to get Photos to export the data to the original image?
It might be that when you sync your photos, in the manner in which you are doing, it is just the file containing the image which is synced to the phone, while the title/caption are being held separately in the photos app and are therefore not synched. When you use the photos app on the Mac and search using titles, the applications matches up a title to a named file and presents the matching photo.
I mean, yes, that's obviously what's happening, and I'm saying it's stupid that this key data isn't synced along with the image so we can search for a synced photo on iPhone the same way we can search for synced songs on iPhone. Even if I name the original file what I want before importing it into Photos on Mac, Photos assigns it's own file name anyway (you only see the file name you assigned underneath the photo when you're browsing your photos. For example, I could name the original file "Jane Smith", but upon importing, Photos names the file something like 78F94221-5FAA-4AF0-979B-9CDAA2D65BB8 (you can see this by "Showing the Package Contents" of your Photos Library and looking under "originals".