Captions in Mac Tahoe Photos Not Working

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Level 2

190 points

Captions in Mac Tahoe Photos Not Working

Captioning in the Photos application in Tahoe does not work for me.

I have been adding captions to my photos since it was first offered in iPhoto and all the way up to Sequoia. Now when I go the Get Info panel for the photo and start typing, it literally fights me.

Typing a word is a struggle, it tries to backspace almost every keystroke. Sometimes I can paste in short snippits, but spaces are always deleted. Usually no matter what, after a few seconds it wipes everything out and shows "Looking for captions..." in the text field.

I do not have a problem typing anywhere else on my Mac. My only problem is in this one field in Photos, the other fields in the same Get Info window work fine.

Anyone else seeing this? Any thoughts? Thank you.

Mac mini (M4, 2024)

Posted on Dec 19, 2025 10:50 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 19, 2025 11:32 AM in response to Tim's Tree

That's not happening for me using an M3Book with either 26.1 or 26.2

Can you tell us some details?

Where does your Mac's Photos Library reside-- in the Pictures folder of your internal drive, or on an external drive? or on a network? on iCloud drive?
Are you using iCloud Photos to synchronize your devices? If so
…Do you have “Optimize Storage” checked in Photos’ Settings
…Do you have more than 10% free storage on your iCloud account?
What is your storage on this Mac? At System Settings>General> Storage, my Mac says 756 GB of 1 TB used. What does yours say? Is your free storage on your Mac less than 10%?

To help figure out what's going on, I would try these things:

Restart the computer (of course)
Re-start in Safe Mode. This bypasses certain potentially disruptive processes, and it often helps. Safe Mode is different for different computers, so see this:

Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support

Use another library if you have one, or make a small test Library with a few pictures in it and see if the same thing happens. You can create a new Library by closing Photos and then option-clicking on the Photos icon.
Make a new user and see if the same problem recurs with it. This is a bit harder, because a new user can't access a different user's stuff. You would need to temporarily move your Library out of your own user's Pictuers folder up to the general "Users" folder.
Rebuild your Photos Library--close Photos and re-launch by option-command-clicking the app icon. If you use iCloud Photos, it’s possible that this will cause a re-sync that lasts long enough to make you nervous.

The idea is to find out if the problem is with the Library, with your account, or with caches and login items, and stuff like that. One of these steps may fix the problem, but their failure to work also helps figure out what's happening.

Let us know what happens…

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Answer 2

Tim's Tree Author

Level 2

190 points

Dec 19, 2025 2:12 PM in response to Richard.Taylor

Thanks for the reply Richard!

• I have two user accounts on this Mac and both of them present this behavior.

• Both libraries are on external SSDs (they each have their own drive).

• I do not use iCloud Photos.

• My internal startup drive is relatively small, but I keep it 25-30% free. My external drives where the libraries exist are 4TB and at least 75% free.

• I have restarted several times as this began immediately after the update to Tahoe. I tried Safe Mode shortly after the Tahoe update.

• I did rebuild one of the libraries within a few days of the Tahoe update, which didn't fix the problem. However that has been a few months, so I will give it another try. I think it took a few days last time.

Tim

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Answer 3

Dec 19, 2025 6:30 PM in response to Tim's Tree

how are your drives formatted? APFS?

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