How to add the HDR Media Type Badge to Photos not Taken with the iPhone

This user tip has been updated and moved to: https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250002653

----------- Ignore this version - the code does no longer work because of a broken formatting

Making the HDR badge overlay show on HDR photos is possible, if we install exiftool (ExifTool by Phil Harvey). If you have an older version of exiftool installed, update to the newest version or the HDR tag may not be recognized.Apple is marking HDR photos taken with the iPhone with a custom EXIF tag -for other HDR photos we have to set the EXIF tag "CustomRendered" to the value 3 for "HDR" (https://sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/TagNames/EXIF.html).

Install exiftool (ExifTool by Phil Harvey), then open a Terminal window.Type the command below into the Terminal window and add a space character at the end of the line:

/usr/local/bin/exiftool -overwrite_original_in_place -preserve '-CustomRendered=HDR'

(with exiftool 11.98 or later use

/usr/local/bin/exiftool -overwrite_original_in_place -preserve '-CustomRendered=HDR (Original Saved)'

Then drag the image file you want to modify from the Finder window directly behind the Terminal command (on the same line) and hit the return key. When you now import the tagged photos to Photos, they will show the HDR badge, even if the HDR image has not been created with the iPhone - I rendered the image files below with Aurora HDR 2018.

The Terminal Command can be captured as a Quick Action to be run from the Finder preview.You can create it using Automator:

The Quick Action needs an action "Get Selected Finder Items" followed by a "Run Apple Script" action.

Paste this into the Apple Script part:

on run {input, parameters}

(* Your script goes here *) tell application "Finder" set sel to the selection set p to sel as alias set pospath to POSIX path of p do shell script "/usr/local/bin/exiftool -overwrite_original_in_place -preserve '-CustomRendered=HDR' " & pospath

-- set the clipboard to pospath return pospath end tell return inputend runSave the Quick Action in the Services folder of the User Library folder.Now you can select a photo in the Finder (exactly one photo) and run it from the Quick Action section in the preview of the image:

I love the quick actions in Mojave!

This user tip was generated from the following discussion: HDR Media Type and Photo Indicator