Pulling photos in and out of Apple Photos, what will happen?

[Heliotropen]

Hi I'm trying to cleaning out my photos in Apple Photos.

If I pull out all Images into a folder: will there then be any difference from when I had them in photos:
I'm thinking in terms of meta data and all such things.
Will it be like they had never been pulled out of Apple Photos when I return them?

Thnx

 

[Dave Braine]

The meta data goes with the image. Just drag one into Finder, right click on it and select Info. All the meta data should be in the Info Panel.

Drag it back into Photos, and the only thing that changes is it's position under the "Photos" ta in the Sidebar. It will appear as the most recent addition, based on its Import date(just now) rather than it's original position of it's original import date.

 

[Heliotropen]

The meta data goes with the image. Just drag one into Finder, right click on it and select Info. All the meta data should be in the Info Panel.

Drag it back into Photos, and the only thing that changes is it's position under the "Photos" ta in the Sidebar. It will appear as the most recent addition, based on its Import date(just now) rather than it's original position of it's original import date.

Thnx man, but will it look like a new photop in AP then?

The reason is I want AP to still deal with the photos as if they are from the time they are taken.

Its a dilemma of pulling photos out into folders I dont want there anymore ... vs easier pull everything out and just put the ones I want to stay as they vente back in.

if that makes sense

 

[Dave Braine]

The reason is I want AP to still deal with the photos as if they are from the time they are taken.

All the meta/exif data; ie date taken, camera used, exposure data etc will be the same as the original, but it's import date will be the date that you re-imported it into Photos.

 

[Heliotropen]

Understood, so I lose the “import” meta data. Dont think I want to do that ...

thnx man

 

[Partron22]

I don't know because I never use Photos, but is there an Appscript method of changing import date? Some Apps allow you to do that. iTunes was notorious for automatically changing "added" dates. I still use Preview, and an AppleScript that prepends the date every photo was taken to every pic's filename. That makes it hard to forget when you were last on the North Country trail.

 

[adrianlondon]

Be careful - on my systems (latest Big Sir and iOS), the Title and Description metadata is trashed if you export a photo that's been edited. Editing could be something as simple as cropping.

More accurately, the Caption is moved from "Description" and "Caption-Abstract" to "Image Description", and the Title is deleted from "Title" and "Object Name".

if you've not edited the photo at all then the IPTC info is left intact.

 

[ignatius345]

All the meta/exif data; ie date taken, camera used, exposure data etc will be the same as the original, but it's import date will be the date that you re-imported it into Photos.

Genuinely asking here, why does the import date matter? My Photos library just displays chronologically according to date taken, regardless of import time. I sometimes bring in images from my Olympus and they just drop in right next to whatever iPhone photos I took, in chronological order.

As far as the metadata in general, this is all pretty easy to test:

- Inspect a few images within Photos, take note of their metadata
- drag them out to the desktop
- delete them from Photos
- reimport them into Photos
- check the metadata again to see if anything has changed.

 

[adrianlondon]

Genuinely asking here, why does the import date matter? My Photos library just displays chronologically according to date taken, regardless of import time. I sometimes bring in images from my Olympus and they just drop in right next to whatever iPhone photos I took, in chronological order.

As far as the metadata in general, this is all pretty easy to test:

- Inspect a few images within Photos, take note of their metadata
- drag them out to the desktop
- delete them from Photos
- reimport them into Photos
- check the metadata again to see if anything has changed.

Same. I sort my photos by "Date Taken", which is the timestamp the camera gives the photo at the time it's taken. Date Created is often the same, but could vary as it might end up being the first time it's written to disk somewhere. Date Modified will be whenever the file was changed, and is best ignored unless you're trying to find when you last edited a photo, or moved it in/out of Photos.

If I give a photo a Title (in Photos on the Mac) and a Description (either in Photos on the Mac, or using the new iOS 14 option in Photos on my phone) and drag the photo out and back in again, both those are lost.

It worked during the first set of Big Sur and iOS 14 betas but has been broken since. Feedbacks have been ignored, which most likely means Apple don't care. It looks like they deliberately delete this data so that you stay permanently within Photos and pay for extra iCloud storage. I'm stubborn - it'll make me do the opposite and I'm looking at alternatives. Interestingly, I may even go back to having an actual camera, which has the advantage of not making me lust after newer iPhones, as a better camera is about the only reason I upgrade nowadays

 

[madeirabhoy]

Hi I'm trying to cleaning out my photos in Apple Photos.

If I pull out all Images into a folder: will there then be any difference from when I had them in photos:
I'm thinking in terms of meta data and all such things.
Will it be like they had never been pulled out of Apple Photos when I return them?

Thnx

just pointing out that dragging them into a folder on finder doesn't remove them from photos.

 

[Dave Braine]

Understood, so I lose the “import” meta data. Dont think I want to do that ...

thnx man

Apologies, I was looking in the wrong place when I put my pictures back into Photos. They were imported back into the same Import date as they were originally.