Where are photo file names?

Interestingly if you select some pictures to print and then in the preview screen select CAPTIONS and within the options offered tick TITLE, then the preview and subsequently printed photos will use the filename as the title if no other title has been added manually. CAPTIONS also has an option to tick FILENAME that as it says prints the filename, which will be the same as the TITLE if a title has not been added manually.

Since Apple can do this for printing why can't they do this for viewing pictures in PHOTOS?

It would be nice if the filename had an additional option of just filename or filename plus directory (especially for those pictures that are not in the Photos library).

Old Toad wrote:

They just left out the writing of the file name into the Title field during import.

To avoid any confusion, note that iPhoto does not automatically write the filename to the title field either. It just displays the filename (less its extension) if the file has no title embedded in it. To write the title field to the file in iPhotos, you have to manually add a title in the space where it displays the filename as a substitute for that.

Just a couple of thoughts.

1. There needs to be a professional tool built into Photos that gives the user the ability to insert the file name into the IPTC Title field. Perhaps as a user selectable process

2. Photos needs to have the same DAM and search, sort capabilities as Aperture. This includes the ability to merge together different libraries and to export user defined unique libraries.

3. The image editing cabilities are probably sufficient as long as they provide a mechanism for external editor use.

Failure to achieve these rather straight forward goals will allow me to leave the Apple ecosystem for image processing. I will never ever use photos to share my photos across platforms without those capabilities. Lightroom already allows me to do that. My hope is they will address these issues, but Photos needs a lot more than fine tuning.

e2photo wrote:

1. There needs to be a professional tool built into Photos that gives the user the ability to insert the file name into the IPTC Title field. Perhaps as a user selectable process

Photos does give users that ability, although it is a manual, one-at-a-time process unless you use an Applescript or Automator process like those you can find in the User Tips section of this forum (see the Incoming Links section at the end of the page for a couple of examples).

As for the rest of it, like iPhoto before it, Photos is not intended for professional use. Not only is it free, it provides substantially more extensive editing tools than iPhoto, plus a way to add inexpensive editing tools to the app itself, which may appeal to non-pro users unwilling to shell out big bucks for third party pro level apps, in no small part because those apps frequently require paid upgrades or subscriptions to use with upgraded OS X versions.

So if you want a pro level app, like LarryHN said, this isn't the app for you.

R-C-R,

You make good points.

However I would offer the following.

There is a middle ground between the novice photographer and the professional. In my own case, I like the editing and complete "cloud based" access to my library from multiple computers.

However, with 33,000 photos, I need better tools to simply organize and access my photos in ways that fit my work flow. Sorting, list views, and some of the other things I used regularly in Aperture would be extremely helpful.

Certainly Photos is free. But I was happy to pay $199 for Aperture to obtain much greater flexibility on managing my photos.

Anyway, the iCloud base is the real draw for me and I am willing to live with the shortcomings of managing my library for the present. I just hope and assume that additional features find their way into Photos over time.

Rex - I feel exactly the same way. I'm definitely missing some tools from Aperture but the advantages/fun of having my 52K photo library on two Macs, an iPad and an iPhone is making me very happy. I used to really struggle with how photos came into Aperture from my iPhone and now other than a slightly longer wait I'm not doing the duplicate dance. The tools are more powerful than most people realize but definitely limited.

One oddity I'm noticing on my devices with optimized images, I take a photo with my iPhone and then want to post it immediately, but iCloud Photo Library has already moved it up to the cloud so I have to wait for it to come back. Have you seen that?

Allison Sheridan wrote:

hmmm... How about this one? When I take a picture with my iPhone there's a very long lag before I can access the photo right from the camera app.

Since this does not involve Photos for the Mac I suggest you ask in the forum for your iPhone

LN

? It's not really a phone issue, it's more to do with the fact that photos are stored in the cloud. I'll be cool though!

iCloud cannot be causing this, unless you are connected to Wi-Fi while shooting the photos. Photos will only upload to iCloud when connected to Wi-Fi, and the Camera app is closed. You should be able to apply filters in the Camera.app immediately. But ask in the iPhone forum.

Leonie - i am probably missing something obvious here, but i created your Service. It shows up in system preferences, but i cannot get it to appear in Photos. says no relevant services.

anything to do?

I took your Script, as shown, and dragged it into Automator. In Automator I choose Service as the selected option. At the top of automator, I selected NO Input and Photos as the application. I then saved the Service. When I opened Photos, I selected 4 Photos that were untitled and ran the Service. Nothing happened. I unselected the photos, and ran the Service. As I understand the code, I should have gotten a warning message telling to select some photos. I got no such warning. What am I doing wrong? Do I have to change the code you provided in some way?

As written it should work in Script Editor. I think I had to make some minor changes to make it work in Automator but offhand I don't recall what they were. I'm not at the Mac just now so I cannot check. Worse, as I started adding in all of my photos the script became erratic and now won't even work with a single file. 😟 I've a feeling more RAM might help but there is possibly a better way to manage the selection of objects.

tt2

So now I'm facing this issue too - I only updated to Yosemite last week (I mainly held off because of the initial issues people had with Photos), El Capitan a few days ago, and Photos today. And I've just discovered most of my what-I-used-to-call titles have disappeared in Photos. I think they were all filenames-as-titles in iPhoto although I haven't carefully checked that yet.

Is the advice given earlier in this thread, about using léonie's script, still considered the best way forward for fixing this? I haven't spent the time puzzling together how to use it yet, but before I start examining AppleScript I want to make sure there hasn't been an easier or more appropriate way developed since then. Remember I only just started using Photos today so it's still pretty easy for me to change something in iPhoto and, er, re-do an import or whatever that was.

Thanks!

Hello Léonie,

Sorry to bother you, i have been reading all this link and i´m having the same problem you are talking about. But my problem is that i´m not familiar with any applescript and English is not my mothertongue, it´s spanish...so i´m having problems to follow your script...i don´t know if i should copy and paste everything or try to understand each step. Could you put me all this in more simple words?

Thank you for reading, i would understand if you wouldn´t answer me, thank you anyway, at least i understand what is wrong with the issue of my photos without titles

I tested the script on my iMac yesterday and also nothing happened, but was able to debug a little using display dialogue to see why. It seemed that "ifnot (exists (title)) then" was not executing properly. I think this was because an apple support guy had me mass change the titles in all my photos to "test". I later mass changed the titles back to nothing. But I think the mere act of mass changing them to "test" created the title attribute. When I mass changed the titles to nothing, the title attribute remained. In other words - not (exists (title)) - was false, even though title was empty, so that line of code didn't allow the title to be set to the filename.

I then created the script again exactly from leonie's directions on an older MacBookPro at home, and it worked perfectly. I think this is because the titles on these photos truly did not exist. Could it be that your titles look empty, but the title attribute exists?

You could change the script the way leonie shows to force the filename into the title regardless of if a title is there or not.

Or you could change "ifnot (exists (title)) then" to something that also checks if the title is empty rather than just checking if it exists. I don't know apple script syntax so I can't say how to do this. We run into this issue at work on different programming platforms and databases - An attribute may appear to be empty, but it still exists.

Sorry, I missed your question here. It is not a good idea to add to a long discussion. I usually only look for posts that do not yet have an answer. But I am glad you found a working version of the script.