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Fix a broken search in Photos

I was having some issues with my desktop photos (which I load from Photos) not working properly, and I noticed that one particular photo wouldn't preview in the Wallpaper System Settings panel. I noted the name, searched for it in Photos, and came up with no matches. Then I tried other searches, for photos I knew were there as I could see them onscreen, and still, no matches. Clearly Photos' search was broken.

I tried the (long, slow, painful) photo library rebuild process, but still, no search.

After much digging, I found a solution that works, which is to force Photos to rebuild its search database. Here's how to do that:

  1. Make sure you have good backup of Photos before you start, just in case.
  2. Also make sure you quit Photos before proceeding.
  3. In Finder, navigate to your Photos.library file and right-click on it. Select Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu.
  4. In the new window that opens, open the database folder. Inside of that folder is a search folder. Delete it, but leave the database folder open.

That's it, you're (almost) done. Now launch Photos, and it will start rebuilding the search database. This can take a while, depending on the size of your database—it took about five or so minutes for my 65,000ish image collection. There's also no onscreen indication that anything is happening, so use Finder: Open the newly-created search folder in Finder, and check the size of the psi.sqlite file. When the size stops changing, the rebuild is done.

I found this answer in a post by Michelle Lyons in this Apple Discussiosn thread. Michelle notes they found the answer elsewhere, but don't link to that source, so I don't know who originally discovered this. All I know is it worked for me!



Retain location metadata on photos sourced from Photos

Update: Per winmaciek's comment, this is a case of user stupidity: There is a setting in Photos' preferences that controls whether location information is exported using all three methods. If you always want it, check that box. However, if you only want it some of the time (i.e. you don't want to accidentally include it in an online post), then use the following method to only export it when you want it.)

If you often take your photos out of Photos1Dear Apple, please stop naming products after their associated nouns!, you should be aware of a big "gotcha" just waiting to bite you: Unless you're careful with how you get your photos out of Photos, you'll lose those photos' location information—and for iPhone photos shot in HEIC, the photos will be converted to JPG.

There are three ways to get a photo out of Photos: Drag to your desktop, use File → Export → Export (n) Photos, or use File → Export → Export Unmodified Originals for (n) Photos. Only one of these methods will retain the photos' location information…

Use File → Export → Export Unmodified Originals for (n) Photos to retain location information

In particular, if you use either of the other two methods, these metadata values will be lost:

kMDItemAltitude
kMDItemGPSDestBearing
kMDItemImageDirection
kMDItemLatitude
kMDItemLongitude
kMDItemSpeed

You can test this yourself very easily: Just use each of the three methods to export the same photo. Rename it each time (drag.jpg, export.jpg, unmodified.heic…or whatever). Then, in Terminal, type mdls, press the Space Bar, and drag and drop one of the photos, then press Return in Terminal. The output is everything macOS knows about the photos. Only the unmodified export will have location information (and still be in HEIC format, if that's what it was originally in).

The downside of this, of course, is that you cannot export an edited photo and save both the edits and the location information. Or if you can, I haven't discovered how.



An oddity with Photos and camera lens information

The other day, I was working on some Smart Albums in Photos, adding a Smart Album for each of the lenses I use with my FUJIFILM X-E3 camera. This seemed like a simple task; each Smart Album just needed to check two conditions:

Camera Model is X-E3 [and] Lens is 16.0 mm f/2.8 (as one example)

But after creating my Smart Albums, I noticed that some photos were missing, so I did a bit of experimenting. What I found was that Photos showed different values for the Lens field—even when the same lens was used on the same camera. Here's an example:

The only difference between those two photos is that one was taken in RAW mode, the other in one of my camera's JPEG modes.

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