How do I retain metadata on pictures when exporting?

Hi

Air drop is not a drag drop from one storage to another (as you described, I assume using finder in which you said the data was changed)

The details on your computer are showing file system dates (created modified opened).

The exif data doesn't show any creation date at all. It's possible the air drop process stripped it out. (air drop is a simultaneous export from phone photos app, and transfer via wife - who knows what that is doing. I don't use air drop - perhaps this is the reason 🙂. Have a look also in the TIFF tab there may be a capture date in there that is correct.

Other data is also showing file system data, not exif data (not surprising as the date is not in the exif.

You say everything is in iCloud and you want to get it out. By far the best way of doing this is to sync to your mac using icloud.

If you create a new empty library, set it to be the system library, and turn on iCloud photos, it will download everything you have in iCloud to this new library. Image capture dates will be transferred. You can then export everything from that library using the photos app file>export - or better file>export unmodified originals - then you will have all the images from iCloud in any folder you want, complete with image capture dates in the exif.

If you don't have enough space on your mac, you might need to create this on an external drive (formatted APFS or MacOS extended)

Step by step:

Hold down the option key while starting photos, and click "create new". Name it somthing.photoslibrary, and locate it in your pictures folder.

Then open the new library - go into photos preferences (general tab), and click "use as system photos library"

Finally in photos preferences iCloud tab, set it up as the final screenshot. (You need to have enough space on your mac to download all the photos from iCloud)

Hang on - are you exporting directly from the phone?

Or do you have pictures downloaded from the phone to the mac (via iCloud). Then exporting from the Photos app on the mac? How are you exporting? Drag/drop, or file>export? Have you checked the image capture date in the photos app before the export? If the latter, here is what I see:

Image in Photos with info pane open...

Exported image data viewed in finder columns view

Image opened in preview, inspector, exif data

Are you mixing up file creation date with image metadata?

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.

(Depending on your system version, if you export unmodified original from photos, you will usually get a file with the same creation date as the image)


You can also see the two different dates in finder, as shown in the screenshot with finder in column view. 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.

The exif data can't change if you just drag/drop the file from one storage to another. Can you post screenshots like I've done above, so we can see what you are looking at.

I have always been able to move pictures from Photos on my MacBook air to my iMac and preserve the metadata such as captions, title and key words. Not now. My pictures only retain the date and location taken. This is huge step backward as I travel and use my laptop for photography and then transfer the annotated pictures to my iMac. This seems to have occurred after operating system upgrades since last year. MacBook air uses Big Sur 11.3.1 and iMac uses Catalina 10.15.7. Interestingly, Photos transferred from my MacBook air to Lightroom Classic on my iMac and kept all the metadata. Interested to know if anyone has found a way to transfer the metadata from one machine to the other using photos?

@gcrva - this is a specific bug with Big Sur. The workaround is to export in PNG format which does contain the metadata (if selected in the export pane), then (if needed) convert to jpg external from photos.

Alternatively to transfer between machines, you can use iCloud photos and sync all the machines together. Metadata is then transferred.

Thanks.