Where are photo file names?

I am not referring to photo "Titles" -- I am referring to photo filenames. In iPhoto, when "Titles" was selected under the View menu, the camera-assigned filenames would appear below the photos. You could then edit the "titles" as seen below:

And that is what I am seeing in Photos - the iPhoto titles below the thumbnails:

In iPhoto, before migrating the library: The default version name remained in iPhoto's Title field:

And in Photos - the same name below the thumbnails, after migrating the iPhoto Library, clearly visible in the "Moments" view.

Toggling "View > Metadata > Titles" turns this on and off.

Some of us are experiencing a situation where Toggling "View > Metadata > Titles does not solve the problem. Yes, it's a necessary step to make titles below photos visible, but, even with that, many photo titles are not appearing. Some do and some don't. In my case, any photo title from iPhoto that had a suffix such as .jpg, .tif, etc. DOES NOT APPEAR under the photo regardless of what is checked under Metadata.

Notice that "Add a Title" appears. The title (filename) was "Ann in Tennessee Shirt" in iPhoto and it appeared under the photograph. In Photos 1.0, however, it does not appear. One has to copy "Ann in Tennessee Shirt" and the paste it into the "Add a Title" field. Can you imagine doing this for thousands of photos?

I just tested - when I am doing the same in Aperture and migrate the Aperture library to Photos, the titles will migrate correctly, even with ".JPG" as part of the version name:

In Aperture: The edited version name below the image

In Photos: The added version names are shown as titles.

I'm not sure this is much of a solution for users importing directly from iPhoto, but one way to make Photos.app show the filename as the title is to create/set the IPTC Title tag before importing your photos into Photos.app.

I'm using ExifTool in a service created through Automator that executes a shell script so that I can select a batch of photos and apply several changes to EXIF tags. But you can easily add a line to also create the IPTC Title tag and set it to the filename.

Here is an example that strips out the file extension and uses a formatting option to start the title after the id (ex: 20150411-000...) I'm using in the filename. You could set the {16} to {0} to return the entire filename as the title.

Just install ExifTool and then create this service and save it. Then you can right click on an image (or a group of images) and batch update the tags.

Couldn't find a solution within Photos, so I resorted to AppleScript:

Here's a really quick and dirty way to do it... I'm sure this could be improved to do proper interpreting of the filename and have proper error conditions:

tell application "Photos" activate set myalbum to the last import album try set itemlist to selection on error errStr number errorNumber return errorstr end try repeat with currentitem in itemlist set currentfile to the filename of currentitem set the name of the currentitem to currentfile as text end repeat end tell return count itemlist

Just open up Script Editor, enter that code into a new item, select the items you want named in Photos, and then run the script.

To do even better, I created a smart album that only contains un-named items. It appears I can't do thousands of photos in one pass, but a few hundred at a time works well.

DRedfearn wrote:

I get as far as creating a new service and dragging the "run apple script" action to the workflow. I then paste in your script. However, at that point, my screen doesn't look like your clip - I don't see the "Service Receives box in Photos App" and the other options I see at the top of your clip.

It sounds like you started by selecting a Workflow document type in Automator. Instead, try starting by selecting the Service document type:

Tip: when you are getting errors from Automator workflows from Applescript actions, it is sometimes helpful to run the script in Script Editor & use the log > Results window to see exactly what's going on step by step.

Léoni;

I got this thread from another post I made, so .....

I tried creating the Automator script but it does not run nor does the new service appear in Photos' services. When I try running the script from Automator, with Photos open and a picture file selected, I get the follow error:

This being my first sue of Automator there's is likely some subtle thing I am doing wrong. Any guidance will be appreciated.

Thanks... Chris

Is there any way with Applescript to just remove/ignore the last four characters of the file name. That would remove all extensions.

If that's not possible in the same scripts how about a script top remove the last four characters from the Title field?

Without modifying the script I added THREE new files, .PSD, .JPG and .JPEG to the library. All filenames were added as titles without the extensions as expected.

I noticed that the second line I've been working with is "Set to include" which keeps .cr2 in the title. I removed that line, keeping .cr2 in the line above, and got the following error message.

I added that line back and it worked as expected on all file extensions in the first line regardless of case.

Let's say I go to Germany for a vacation and on day one I go to Hamburg. I would like to batch change the titles to all say either Hamburg, or even better sequential titles of 01_Hamburg, 02_Hamburg.

Try this script:

on run {input, parameters}

-- batch change the title to the input, © léonie, version 1.0.1

set n_digits to 2 -- how many digits for the appended number

set answer to display dialog "Select the number of digits for the appended numbers (0 .. 10). Selecting '0' will suppress the leading zeros." buttons {"o.k"} default answer n_digits

-- For 1-9 photos use 2. For 10 to 99 photos use 3 and for 100 or more photos use 4.

set n_digits_text to the (text returned of answer)

set n_digits to n_digits_text as number

tell application "Photos"

activate

set counter to 1

set imageSel to (get selection) -- get selected images

if imageSel is {} then

error "Please select some images."

else

repeat with im in imageSel

set ntext to the counter as text

repeat while (the length of ntext < n_digits) -- add leading zeros

set ntext to "0" & ntext

end repeat

tell im

set the name to input & "-" & ntext as text

-- set the title to the input plus formatted number

set counter to counter + 1

end tell

end repeat

end if

end tell

return "Done. The titles of " & (length of imageSel) & " photos have been changed."

end run

and use it in this Automator workflow application:

The first window you'll get is this where you'll put in the title

The next window is this which sets the number of digits for the sequential number:

Which gives you this for the titles:

I save all of my scripts as applications and put them in the Scripts folder

That menu is enabled in AppleScripts Editor's preferences:

You might want to try saving it as an application and see if it will work in the other sections of Photos.

I feel like I'm taking so much of peoples' time but this created an all new error. I did as suggested and re-created the script as an application and saved it to the Scripts folder inside ~/Library. First time I ran it, it renamed the FIRST photo in an album but not the second. Second time I ran it, it failed immediately without renaming any of the files.

HI OT,

I made a copy of the script to convert the title to text with a sequential number as an application and saved it in the scripts folder:

The result is the same - it works in the "All Photos" album, but not in another album.

Thanks for all your help with this.

-Jay