Photos, metadata, iCloud Photos

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Level 1

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Photos, metadata, iCloud Photos

Hi, I hope you can clarify a doubt I have and it is breaking my head. For reasons of wanting to be more efficient in managing my photos I activated the iCloud Photos option on my iPhone SE and my Mac. All of the nearly 12K photos uploaded to the cloud with no problem. I started organizing some photos into albums and all was going well, until I proceeded to try to move the contents of the albums to the computer and from there move them to an external drive for final storage and free up that cloud space. I am pretty sure that when I started the process of moving the photos, it correctly indicated the date they were created, modified and added in the folder where I moved them . But it is my impression that since yesterday when copying the photos it is not copying me the correct information of the day of creation or modification of the photos, and that creates tremendous anxiety for me, since I use that information to recognize the photos and to be able to classify them. Someone tells me that by being in the cloud and downloading them, that information is lost, that I should use the Export command so that the internal EXIF data is preserved, and that any photo program can recognize the EXIF and classify them, but I would prefer to use the Finder instead of a program as such. Any light of guidance/or suggestions? Thanks!

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.14

Posted on Feb 10, 2021 9:23 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

TonyCollinet

Level 7

24,050 points

Feb 10, 2021 11:41 PM in response to BlackCatPR

Hi

Are you using the photos app at all? iCloud photos only operates together with the photos app, which suggests that you are, yet your last statement suggests that you don't.

How did you copy the photos? If you drag from the photos window you are not always copying full resoluion/full quality images - you will get only the previews stored in the library. Which in some cases will be smaller than the originals. Instead you should use the file/export menu.

You can either select "export" which will export the edited version of your photo, or "export unmodified original" which will export the photo exactly as it was when imported.

Regarding the dates:

You need to distinguish between the file metatdata (information about the file) and the image metadata (information about the image in the file)

If you copy a file the copies creation date will normally be set to the date the file was copied. The image metadata inside the file (which you can view in preview with the inspector window, iptc tab) will show the image capture date.

Summary:

The File metadata is kept in the file system, and represents when that copy of the file is created or modified

The image metadata is kept inside the file, as exif and IPTC data. This won't change when you copy / move the file.

You can also see the two different dates in finder, as shown in the screenshot. This is from an image I exported from photos in july 2019 - so the file has been created and last modified then, but the content creation date is still showing 2011...

Having said that - if you export unmodified original it also sets the file date as it was when imported. (At least it does on Catalina - I can't speak for other versions of MacOS)

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Answer 2

léonie

Level 10

200,621 points

Feb 11, 2021 2:49 AM in response to TonyCollinet

Having said that - if you export unmodified original it also sets the file date as it was when imported. (At least it does on Catalina - I can't speak for other versions of MacOS)

One caveat, Tony. When you are using iCloud Photos, the file creation date of the originals may be changed to the date, you download the file from iCloud Photos to your Mac. This is particularly inconvenient for videos, that have no exif content created tag. We can see this by sorting the originals folder in the library package by date. On this Mac I am using an optimised library, and the originals are continually making roundtrips to iCloud Photos and back.

Photos I imported today to my Photos Library are still showing the original creation date from 2015 of the imported file, but most of the original files in the originals folder are having now a date of member 20120, when I first set up this Mac by syncing it with iCloud.

Here is a screenshot of the originals in my library package, sorted by date:

The oldest files have been created in 2002, and the originals in the old iPhoto Libraries are still showing this creation date.

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Photos, metadata, iCloud Photos

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