Comments in finder "get info" window have all disappeared?

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Level 1

80 points

Comments in finder "get info" window have all disappeared?

I send customers pictures of their completed orders for my work, and I always copy/paste the order details into the "Comments" section of the image files (Highlight image file > Cmd I) so that I can later search those terms and find that file.

Since the most recent update, ALL of the Comments are gone! I'm talking literally thousands of important images, with ALL details gone. This is a minor disaster for my business. Is anything being done about this? Is there any way I can retrieve those Comments? This is incredibly troublesome and a violation of basic functionality that's having a major impact on my livelihood, please fix!

iMac 27", 10.13

Posted on Feb 11, 2019 8:58 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

leroydouglas

Community+ 2024

Level 10

189,132 points

Feb 11, 2019 10:13 AM in response to Micah D.

<< "Since the most recent update.." >>

In catastrophic cases like yours, the best advice is restore from a backup—to get back to where you were before the disaster.

How to use Time Machine to back up or restore your Mac: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201250

or from another of your backup sources, until more resesarch and a work around or cause of failure comes to the surface.

With your same Apple ID you can sign up for a free Developers Account and start a conversation with Apple engineers

Bug Reporter https://bugreport.apple.com/

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Answer 2

Feb 11, 2019 12:25 PM in response to Micah D.

What I am observing in macOS High Sierra, is that if one uses Finder to copy a file with comments in it to another same drive destination, or iCloud Drive, the comments are preserved. On the otherhand, and in defiance of expectations, using Terminal-based commands such as cp -p, or ditto — where either are supposed to preserve extended attributes — do not do so when copying the file to another same drive location, or iCloud Drive. Misleadingly, the comment metadata flag will remain on the file, but the comments themselves are gone when observed from a Get Info panel.

Although I can confirm that the Finder comments are present on the file copied to iCloud Drive using the High Sierra Finder copy, that same file when accessed from iCloud Drive on macOS Mojave 10.14.3 will now show the comments missing in a Finder Get Info panel. BUMP.

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Answer 3

Micah D. Author

Level 1

80 points

Feb 11, 2019 12:55 PM in response to VikingOSX

Unfortunately for me, that is not the case. This is independent of any copying. The comments in the "Get info" window for my files are all simply gone. None of them were copied or moved from the file they have been in for years, the comments simply don't exist any longer.

Oddly, if I search for a word that is in the comments of multiple images, for instance "Blueberry" all the images that have/had that word in the comments show up in the search UNTIL I click in the comment field of the "Get info" window. Then when I click back to the Finder window containing the search, that image suddenly disappears from the search results. It's as if the computer "sees" the comments that are gone, but as soon as you click in the Comment area of the "Get info" window the comments actually disappear even to the computer and it can't find them any longer. Really frustrating.

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