Photos App - Can you recover the original file name if you expert unmodified image

[mindquest]

Moving to Catalina from Mojave and didn't know that Photos App renames the image file names. Was wondering if anyone knows if when you export the unmodified original image will it restore the original file name?

How Photos 5.0 on Catalina Manages origin… - Apple Community

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With the early versions of Photos it has been easy to recover the original image files from the Library package, simply by ctrl-clicking the Photos Library and using the command "Show Package Contents", as long as we did not use an optimized iCloud Photos Library. Photos 1 to Photos 4 are keeping the originals unmodified in the folder Masters, organized by the import session in subfolders by Year, Month, Day, using the original filename.

Photos is no longer storing the original files exactly as we imported them There is a new folder "Originals", where all photos are stored renamed to cryptic names in an apparently random sequence.

The imported file in the library will be named like this:

 

[mindquest]

If anyone can test this it would be appreciated!

 

[ApfelKuchen]

I tested it. It took a few minutes. I'm not sure why you couldn't have tested it yourself, as it's totally non-destructive.

At the enduser level, the image files are not renamed. If you do a Get Info on an image in Photos, it shows the original file name. If you Export that image, it uses the original file name. The filename displayed in the Originals folder is totally invisible to the enduser.

What I think is happening is that the filenames in the Originals folder are being displayed in hexadecimal format, rather than ASCII text. That's a test (obtaining a Hex-to-ASCII converter app) that I'm not going to bother with.

[Edit] Alternate theory is that these are actually new filenames in order to assign a unique name to each image file in a situation where there are fewer nested folders. (Filenames that may be unique within a single folder may encounter naming conflicts when files from multiple folders are moved to a single folder.) I know with my cameras that it's possible to see the file naming sequence reset to "0" either by choice from within the settings or after a battery replacement. It's much safer to give each file a unique name/value, and then depend on that file's metadata to locate the original filename.

Overall, I think that what happened is that the structure of the Photos library on macOS was reconfigured to be consistent with the iCloud Photos library structure in the cloud. The old nested-folders structure of iPhoto/Aperture/Photos libraries is convenient for humans, but has no benefit to a computer that simply needs to read metadata and display the results of search queries.

 

[mindquest]

I tested it. It took a few minutes. I'm not sure why you couldn't have tested it yourself, as it's totally non-destructive.

At the enduser level, the image files are not renamed. If you do a Get Info on an image in Photos, it shows the original file name. If you Export that image, it uses the original file name. The filename displayed in the Originals folder is totally invisible to the enduser.

What I think is happening is that the filenames in the Originals folder are being displayed in hexadecimal format, rather than ASCII text. That's a test (obtaining a Hex-to-ASCII converter app) that I'm not going to bother with.

[Edit] Alternate theory is that these are actually new filenames in order to assign a unique name to each image file in a situation where there are fewer nested folders. (Filenames that may be unique within a single folder may encounter naming conflicts when files from multiple folders are moved to a single folder.) I know with my cameras that it's possible to see the file naming sequence reset to "0" either by choice from within the settings or after a battery replacement. It's much safer to give each file a unique name/value, and then depend on that file's metadata to locate the original filename.

Overall, I think that what happened is that the structure of the Photos library on macOS was reconfigured to be consistent with the iCloud Photos library structure in the cloud. The old nested-folders structure of iPhoto/Aperture/Photos libraries is convenient for humans, but has no benefit to a computer that simply needs to read metadata and display the results of search queries.

Thanks for testing it! As I said before I am still on Mojave at least till September so couldn't test it. This issue was something that would make me pause going to Catalina.

As long as you can export the images at a later date and retain the original file names then that is good news!