is it just me or has OSX never worked correctly with image details?
For as long as i can remember (20 years) I've had to open Photoshop to find out what the Res of an image is.
in windows it couldn't be easier, but on a Mac, only very rarely is this data ever populated.
Is there a reason for this? Is there a fix? is it permanent?
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 13.6
> indication of if it is indexing it or not
I check Spotlight activity via the Activity Monitor and look if there is activity in the "mdworker*" processes.
In the attached screenshot I had just turned Spotlight "Privacy" back ON. The APFS thumb drive had 1500 images with no resolution etc info in Finder > Get Info. After about 30 seconds those "mdworker_shared" had disappeared and CPU activity had calmed down, and that metadata was again displayed. Also exFAT (MBR) behaved the same (can NTFS be indexed?).
AFAIR in the past Spotlight indexing could be checked by clicking the Spotlight icon in the menubar (it showed Indexing... if active) but I could not access that info in Sonoma 14.4.
> one that had the data, and one that didn't
Finder might cache some info: with Spotlight OFF there was no resolution info in a test .jpg. With Spotlight back ON, all other images' resolution etc display was OK but that .jpg was not. Apparently Finder had cached the empty display for that .jpg. After re-mounting the thumb drive that .jpg was once again OK (I guess re-launching Finder might have the same effect).
But I usually check metadata via GraphicConverter Browser. In the screenshot below Spotlight was OFF for that volume. On the other hand, GC uses Spotlight for its search and my pet peeve is that for some strange reason Spotlight does not index .m4v metadata while with .mp4 and .mov it works as expected (just changing .m4v suffix to .mp4 makes it work for GC, Finder and Spotlight search).
p.s. If you wonder why that filename is 1900 but the metadata date is 1904: I have that photo in a shared Google Photos album. 1902 is the earliest image date and 1904 is the earliest movie date that works reliably Google Photos. So I use 1904 as the earliest metadata date for both and put the correct date in the filename for those old images and movies.
> indication of if it is indexing it or not
I check Spotlight activity via the Activity Monitor and look if there is activity in the "mdworker*" processes.
In the attached screenshot I had just turned Spotlight "Privacy" back ON. The APFS thumb drive had 1500 images with no resolution etc info in Finder > Get Info. After about 30 seconds those "mdworker_shared" had disappeared and CPU activity had calmed down, and that metadata was again displayed. Also exFAT (MBR) behaved the same (can NTFS be indexed?).
AFAIR in the past Spotlight indexing could be checked by clicking the Spotlight icon in the menubar (it showed Indexing... if active) but I could not access that info in Sonoma 14.4.
> one that had the data, and one that didn't
Finder might cache some info: with Spotlight OFF there was no resolution info in a test .jpg. With Spotlight back ON, all other images' resolution etc display was OK but that .jpg was not. Apparently Finder had cached the empty display for that .jpg. After re-mounting the thumb drive that .jpg was once again OK (I guess re-launching Finder might have the same effect).
But I usually check metadata via GraphicConverter Browser. In the screenshot below Spotlight was OFF for that volume. On the other hand, GC uses Spotlight for its search and my pet peeve is that for some strange reason Spotlight does not index .m4v metadata while with .mp4 and .mov it works as expected (just changing .m4v suffix to .mp4 makes it work for GC, Finder and Spotlight search).
p.s. If you wonder why that filename is 1900 but the metadata date is 1904: I have that photo in a shared Google Photos album. 1902 is the earliest image date and 1904 is the earliest movie date that works reliably Google Photos. So I use 1904 as the earliest metadata date for both and put the correct date in the filename for those old images and movies.
Once you select the Spotlight Results categories in Settings : Siri & Spotlight, then re-index the startup drive, any subsequent changes to the operating system (and your files) are reindexed automatically during the day, and on first boot.
The Finder's Get Info panel is based on Spotlight indexing of the file in question. Quick Look will display images on the local drive and for RAW files, only those whose camera model is currently supported by Apple in the current operating system.
Spotlight is not going to work on a mounted Windows NTFS Share.
I happen to have a raw .NEF image here from a Nikon Zfc.
The volume must be indexed by Spotlight for that to work.
Sometimes Spotlight might be forced to re-index the volume. A detour to safe boot might also help.
Where are those image files?
I have no problem with image files stored in my system drive.
I don't have an external drive just now, but I remember in the past there were such issues with media on external drives - quite possible an issue with Spotlight, as Matti suggested.
Also, if on an external, how is the drive formatted? Maybe that is a factor as well.
If I move the image to my desktop and get info, it might show the file size. But on my external drive(S) and network this information is NOT available.
Do we need to index external devices every time I connect or add one to the Mac environment?
If we use USB Key, network, external drive... etc in windows, the file size is right there. I feel like we're missing something. Is this just a drawback of UNIX?
@VikingOSX
What's odd is that while I trying to answer these question, I copied a file to my desktop Got Info, it showed me the camera info on the DESKTOP version, but not on the Server version. I realized i copied the wrong photo versus the server version so for consistency sake I grabbed the same one, and that one isn't showing the additional Data.
There is no rhyme or reason for what it decides to share. The EXIF info is intact on both, as far as Photoshop is concerned (focal length...ect).
I've tried to "re-"index Macintosh HD to force it to to read file data. but that's not helping.
Is there a way to have OSX "index" everything there ever is, was, and will be?
or is indexing something we just need to always DO, when ever new files are added to anything?
who would have thought file resolution would be some cumbersome.
the network would be formatted for PCs so No Apple anything. But I can't see why that should stop get info for working. (I mean INFO should be available in the INFO panel regardless no?)
External drive is APFS
OK, I can live without the Network files being unreadable. even though it's the 21 century.
But how do I index my external APFS drive to show file dimensions? (jpg, psd, tiff, png, eps, raw,... anything a designer would use)
I've tried the "+ to private, - from private" method.
It's actually my working disk since a Laptop has limited capacity and network drives are slow.
If that external drive is not a boot drive, but used for data, then adding it to Spotlight Privacy, waiting a few seconds, and then removing it should start the Spotlight indexing of that drive. A 2TB drive will take awhile depending how much content you have stored there, so do not expect immediate results.
The century we are in does not fix the fact that some non-Apple drives are not indexable by Spotlight since it was designed to index Apple formatted drives. There are third-party utilities (such as Find Any File) that can provide search features on Apple and non-Apple drives. There is a free trial from that vendor's site.
I've done the Add/Remove thing. No indication of if it is indexing it or not. Is there a way to tell?
Is there no "index" this drive button? Isn't it weird that we need to pretend to make a drive private than don't to index?
Apologies for my frustration. You'd just think by now resolution would not be a Private bit of information. no more so than the thumbnail of said unlocked not private image.
Also, the two images put on my desktop, one that had the data, and one that didn't I just got info on both again, and now BOTH don't have data.
How can that be?
@Matti @Viking
Thank you for the thorough responses. Very much appreciated. Hopefully your responses will help others as well in the future.
The External Drive appears to be showing all the metadata now.
The .m4v files not showing data, yet while changing the suffix makes it work... very weird.
I didn't notice the Indexing in the Spotlight search bar like you shared there Viking, but then again i wasn't looking for it.
thanks again
Launch the 🔍 Spotlight menu extras tool. If Spotlight is indexing there will be a progress bar on that panel. You cannot perform any Spotlight searches while indexing is in progress.
> .m4v files not showing data, yet while changing the suffix makes it work
To be more precise, the same movie displays some metadata as .m4v, but more right after it its suffix is changed to .mp4:
MacBook Pro is unable to display Image Detail Resolution Dimension
