Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Level 1

6 points

Exporting photos description missing

Hi, I'm new to this forum so please be gentle! I'm using a 2008 Macbook Air running Mountain Lion and iLife 2011. Unfortunately somewhere down the line my iPhoto library has become corrupted and it won't save Faces information, often crashes etc. I took it to an Apple store and the guy managed to load on an older library from my Time Machine backup without me losing too many pictures, however the same thing kept happening.

As I didn't know when the problem started occurring and did'nt want to lose anything else he suggested I load all my photos onto an external drive and then re-import them to create a new library (he already tried re-building my current one with no success). This suited me anyway as I wanted a back-up of all my photos and then I can just import a selected few to run on Aperture instead, which I've just purchased. So my problem is...

My new back-up drive is a Seagate 1TB Back Up Plus so lots of room. I exported the files as TIFF's in order to keep as much information as possible, ticked all the boxes to save titles, places etc and have copied all the events in my library.

Before doing anything with my current library I tried re-importing a few pictures back in, just to make sure it was successful. The photos are there in TIFF format with the right titles, places etc, however all my descriptions are not. I noticed they show for a second, then disappear and if I had any old description on the photo from when I originally imported it years ago that shows instead.

Please help! I don't want to lose all my descriptions as it took me hours to enter and I have almost 10,000 photos!

MacBook Air, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on May 30, 2013 6:55 AM

31 replies

Jun 22, 2013 1:52 PM in response to jannabeech

I admit stripping out the metadata with Graphic Converter feels rather drastic, but iPhoto seems to work perfectly happily with the resulting files as far as I can see.

Like you, I would like to know if I am going to discover later that I have lost something really important. But for the present I much prefer having files in which the descriptions (I have thousands of them laboriously entered) do not disappear whenever I export the files.

The ExifTool method of removing Exif and XMP metadata detailed by CactusTree (link in my earlier post) seems to be a milder way of achieving the same result. CactusTree's discussion applies to Aperture, but it works just the same for iPhoto. The trouble is you have to fiddle around with Terminal, but once you get used to doing this, it's actually really quick and simple. I've decided I prefer this method to using Graphic Converter.

Exporting photos description missing