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…
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.
Hi, Rob. You can also hold the option key when you drag a photo out of Photos, to get the unmodified image.
Neat trick, thanks!
-rob.
Weird. I just had a play around with this and found that if I exported a modified/edited image to an external drive (formatted as APFS, Tried two different drives) then all the location information is preserved. BUT if I export to the internal SSD (of my 14" MacBook Pro) then not only is the location information missing but a whole heap of other info is missing as well.
Below are the results of the mdls command run on an image exported from Photos (I generally reduce the size for posting to social media). The first to the Pictures folder of my Internal SSD, the second to an external hard disk. The same export options were used in Photos just the destination changed.
192:Desktop> mdls /Users/AAAAA/Pictures/IMG_2931.jpeg
kMDItemFSContentChangeDate = (null)
kMDItemFSCreationDate = (null)
kMDItemFSCreatorCode = ""
kMDItemFSFinderFlags = (null)
kMDItemFSHasCustomIcon = (null)
kMDItemFSInvisible = 0
kMDItemFSIsExtensionHidden = (null)
kMDItemFSIsStationery = (null)
kMDItemFSLabel = (null)
kMDItemFSName = (null)
kMDItemFSNodeCount = (null)
kMDItemFSOwnerGroupID = (null)
kMDItemFSOwnerUserID = (null)
kMDItemFSSize = (null)
kMDItemFSTypeCode = ""
kMDItemInterestingDate_Ranking = 2023-01-06 00:00:00 +0000
kMDItemLastUsedDate = 2023-01-06 21:48:56 +0000
kMDItemLastUsedDate_Ranking = 2023-01-06 00:00:00 +0000
kMDItemUseCount = 1
kMDItemUsedDates = (
"2023-01-06 14:00:00 +0000"
)
192:Desktop> mdls /Volumes/testing/IMG_2931.jpeg
_kMDItemDisplayNameWithExtensions = "IMG_2931.jpeg"
kMDItemAcquisitionMake = "Apple"
kMDItemAcquisitionModel = "iPhone 13 Pro"
kMDItemAltitude = 9.715574783683559
kMDItemAperture = 1.169925002106682
kMDItemBitsPerSample = 24
kMDItemColorSpace = "RGB"
kMDItemContentCreationDate = 2023-01-02 21:48:24 +0000
kMDItemContentCreationDate_Ranking = 2023-01-02 00:00:00 +0000
kMDItemContentModificationDate = 2023-01-02 21:48:24 +0000
kMDItemContentType = "public.jpeg"
kMDItemContentTypeTree = (
"public.jpeg",
"public.image",
"public.data",
"public.item",
"public.content"
)
kMDItemCreator = "16.2"
kMDItemDateAdded = 2023-01-06 21:50:56 +0000
kMDItemDisplayName = "IMG_2931.jpeg"
kMDItemDocumentIdentifier = 0
kMDItemEXIFVersion = "2.3.2"
kMDItemExposureMode = 0
kMDItemExposureProgram = 2
kMDItemExposureTimeSeconds = 6.999860002799944e-05
kMDItemFlashOnOff = 0
kMDItemFNumber = 1.5
kMDItemFocalLength = 5.7
kMDItemFocalLength35mm = 26
kMDItemFSContentChangeDate = 2023-01-06 21:50:56 +0000
kMDItemFSCreationDate = 2023-01-06 21:50:56 +0000
kMDItemFSCreatorCode = ""
kMDItemFSFinderFlags = 0
kMDItemFSHasCustomIcon = (null)
kMDItemFSInvisible = 0
kMDItemFSIsExtensionHidden = 0
kMDItemFSIsStationery = (null)
kMDItemFSLabel = 0
kMDItemFSName = "IMG_2931.jpeg"
kMDItemFSNodeCount = (null)
kMDItemFSOwnerGroupID = 99
kMDItemFSOwnerUserID = 99
kMDItemFSSize = 775816
kMDItemFSTypeCode = ""
kMDItemGPSDestBearing = 53.72198488333881
kMDItemHasAlphaChannel = 0
kMDItemImageDirection = 53.72198488333881
kMDItemInterestingDate_Ranking = 2023-01-06 00:00:00 +0000
kMDItemISOSpeed = 50
kMDItemKind = "JPEG image"
kMDItemLastUsedDate = 2023-01-06 21:50:56 +0000
kMDItemLastUsedDate_Ranking = 2023-01-06 00:00:00 +0000
kMDItemLatitude = -28.13083333333333
kMDItemLogicalSize = 775816
kMDItemLongitude = 153.4803466666667
kMDItemMeteringMode = 3
kMDItemOrientation = 0
kMDItemPhysicalSize = 778240
kMDItemPixelCount = 3000000
kMDItemPixelHeight = 1500
kMDItemPixelWidth = 2000
kMDItemProfileName = "Apple Wide Color Sharing Profile"
kMDItemRedEyeOnOff = 0
kMDItemResolutionHeightDPI = 72
kMDItemResolutionWidthDPI = 72
kMDItemSpeed = 0
kMDItemUseCount = 3
kMDItemUsedDates = (
"2023-01-06 14:00:00 +0000"
)
kMDItemWhiteBalance = 0
This looks like Spotlight is busted on your internal drive. What do you see for other files you copy there, say just using Finder, from an external drive, for instance?
-rob.
OK, That seems to be the case. Simply copying a file from the external drive results in the same lack of metadata.
There doesn't seem to be a way of including a screenshot here but I'm running Venture 13.1 and whatever version of Photos that comes with it. When I export a photo or photos the dialog box that comes up apart from including choices for type of export image, size, quality, etc. also has a check box for Including Location Information which I generally leave checked.
I think that’s purely a matter of settings on your machine. Go to preferences and make sure “include location” is checked (second checkbox from the bottom). That solves it for drag and drop (also sends photos with the location to any app using share sheet, so careful, I guess).
As for the export option, there’s a checkbox to include location info. And that preserves the information too.
I have check both of these on my machine running Ventura 13.1 and the metadata for location is preserved in all of those three cases provided that checkboxes are used.
I noticed that there are interesting fields reported by exiftool on my CR2 (Canon raw) photos that aren't on my JPEGs:
'Camera Temperature','Depth Of Field','Focus Distance Upper','Focus Distance Lower','Focus Mode','Live View Shooting'
It turns out they're not standard exif fields, but some other type of embedded data, and you just *can't* embed them on JPEGs while adhering to the standard. So I had to come up with another process to get that data on my website with the pictures (shovel the exiftool data from the raw that the jpeg was generated from into a database).