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Photo metadata gone from Finder preview on external drives?

Previously in Finder I could see basic metadata about an image - e.g. the dimensions, camera info whether the image was on an internal or external drive.

When I export photographs from say Lightroom, the info I saw in Finder was useful for checking that I had correct dimensions and/or file size for example.

That behaviour seems to have changed:

1) Basic metadata is no longer shown when image is on external drive

2) For images on external SSD, if I Show Preview Options and tick the metadata items to display, the fields display but are all empty

3) The Preview options do not stick. When you close the options pane, the metadata fields vanish.

See screenshots.

Mac mini, macOS 13.1

Posted on Dec 14, 2022 10:20 PM

Best reply

Thunderclutch Author

Level 1

59 points

Posted on Dec 15, 2022 12:23 AM

Indeed it does, and guess what, my external SSD is APFS.

What the issue turned out to be was that a hidden file .metadata_never_index_unless_rootfs had been placed in the root folder on my SSD, stopping indexing.

How did it get there? Not by my hand. It must have occurred during the update to Ventura 13.1.

Deleting this file, ejecting the SSD and rebooting the Mac mini set indexing going again.

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Photo metadata gone from Finder preview on external drives?

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