Change Image Title in Photos

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Change Image Title in Photos

I have several photos in Photos that have a standard name (I guess given by the camera it was taken by) like "IMG_0001.jpg". since a lot of other photos have the same name, I can not export them all at once without skipping the duplicate names. so I wanted to change those names, but found out that it does not work with all of them:

In the Photos app itself one can only give the photo a title which is independent from the file name. when I export the file, delete the old file from the library and then import it with a new name the photo still has the same name in the Photos app, even though there is not a single attribute in the file properties that saved the old name.

As you can see in the screenshot I've attached, those photos were all taken by a "professional" camera (not mine) and have a lot of information that can only be seen easily in a photo application. at least I can not see it in the standard properties, so I'm gonna assume it's encoded into the file under another attribute category. I would like to adjust those attributes now, without having to decode every single JPEG.

Anybody has an idea or knows about this problem?

Thanks in advance!

Posted on Nov 25, 2021 7:04 AM

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Answer 1

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Yer_Man

Level 10

163,698 points

Nov 25, 2021 8:17 AM in response to Chris-96

In the Photos app itself one can only give the photo a title which is independent from the file name. when I export the file, delete the old file from the library and then import it with a new name

Why would you do this? Just add a title and then when exporting choose the option to Use the title as Filename in the export dialogue. If you're exporting as original then the Finder will add a suffix to distinguish the files with identical names and you'll get something like IMG_001.jpg; IMG_001-1.jpg

What you're referring to in your last paragraph is the standard Exif metadata and most of that can be seen in the Gallery view in Finder, also in Preview or in any Photo application. This is available from every camera, professional or not.

interestingly it does not even help to adjust the file extension. I've renamed IMG_0001.jpg to test.png and after importing it to Photos it was a JPEG again.

Of course not. Jpegs and pngs are entirely different forms of file, each using different compression algorithms. One is lossy, the other lossless. One has full support for Exif and IPTC metadata, one doesn't. One is used on virtually every camera in the world, one is used on almost none anywhere. Changing the extension won't change the nature of the file. If you want to change the nature of the file export as a png, tiff or jpeg as you prefer.

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Answer 2

Chris-96 Author

Level 1

9 points

Nov 25, 2021 8:53 AM in response to Yer_Man

Thank you for your answer!

The Export dialogue actually works as a workaround.

But the numbering (e.g. IMG_001-1.jpg) is exactly what the Finder does not do in this case, this is what I don't understand. It somehow is not allowed to change the file name as it does in other situations.

I did not see the Exif metadata in the Finder, but you're right.

I would imagine that changing the extension would not actually change the structure of the file (as it does with other media forms), but for the OS it should be the identifier to handle it as such. That's why I thought maybe Photos would not find some of the metadata anymore.

It's not really elegant to do it like this and also not consistent with how MacOS generally handles files, but thank you very much! I can at least stop the errors now...

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Answer 3

Chris-96 Author

Level 1

9 points

Nov 25, 2021 7:07 AM in response to Chris-96

interestingly it does not even help to adjust the file extension. I've renamed IMG_0001.jpg to test.png and after importing it to Photos it was a JPEG again.

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Change Image Title in Photos

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