I want to add some photos in Google Pictures to my Photos Albums on my phone or my Mac. But the only way I've found to do that is to save the photos to my hard drive, then import them. When I do that, I lose the date, all the camera information, and the location. I want to preserve that information. Is there a way to do that?
iMac 27″, macOS 14.4
Try using the Download command in Google Photos: it's under the three vertical dots. Or try the options in this article:
https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/how-to-transfer-google-photos-to-pc-or-mac
Google Photos should preserve original metadata. If you have added metadata (dates, locations etc), you can use Google takeout which puts added metadata to sidecar .json files which you can then join to the originals with GraphicConverter or exiftool.
I get all the metadata that I can see in Google Photos.
Notice that if you have edited any metadata inside Google Photos (date, location, description, rating), that info must be exported via Google takeout as .json sidecar files and combined to the originals with some 3rd party tool like GraphicConverter or exiftool.
But if you have not done that, no further action is needed.
I haven't added any metadata. But I don't see any metadata when I do a "Get Info…" on the downloaded photos, so I don't think Google Photos is saving it. But it might be happening on the Mac end when I do the download.
I export the images by right-clicking on them and choosing "Save Image As…" The original has the date; camera, including f-stop, exposure, focal length, and ISO; and location. None of this shows up in the downloaded photo on my iMac. If I import it into Photos, it doesn't show up either. As far as I can tell, it all gets lost. I've posted this question on Google's help pages 10 days ago, but I didn't get any response.
I'd ask on a Google Photos forum about how to get these items from there with all the metadata intact.
Yes. I posted this question there, too, but I haven't had any responses yet.
Where are the images stored? In Photos library, on an external disk?
What Get Info -- Finder or Photos?
How did you export the images from Google Photos? What metadata did the images display there?
Yer_Man: Thank you for the suggestion. The Download command (under the three dots) worked great! I get all the metadata that I can see in Google Photos.
How do I import photos from Google PIctuers into my Mac Photos library without lising date/time, camera settings, and GPS?
