Q: Where are photo file names?

I have to retract my JPEG vs. RAW issue with titles. This is what happens when you try to generalize your first view of a 50,000+ image library conversion.

BUT, I do have an issue where Photos has assigned the filename to the title field for some of my images while leaving it blank for others. If I look at the same images in Aperture the Title field in the General info data is blank in both cases.

léonie wrote:

That is clearly a bug.

The titles are supposed to be transferred, even if .jpg is part of the title.

 

But titles & filenames are actually two very different things. For example, photograph files may have title information embedded in the photo file itself according to at least six different standards. The filename is not actually part of the file. It is a characteristic of the file system of the device storing the photo file. As a consequence, changing the filename (for instance, in the OS X Finder) will not change the title of the photo, nor will it create one if that info has not been embedded in the file.

Unfortunately, iPhoto obscures this difference because in the absence of an embedded title, it will display the filename of the photo. If you edit that displayed name from within iPhoto, it does become the title, but it does not change the filename of the original or embed it in that file. (That's why the export workaround mentioned by thedatadude does not work if the export kind is set to Original.)

I don't own Aperture or know how it works but my guess is it embeds the "version name" in the file itself, probably according to the IPTC or XMP standard.

Anyway, the problem is Photos does not display the filename as if it was the title like iPhoto does, nor does it have any builtin feature that will copy the filename to the title. That isn't a bug per se, but it definitely is a problem for those who have been relying on filenames to create more meaningful photo titles.

As I mentioned in a post earlier today, Applescript may offer a way to do this. I have spent a little time since then investigating that possibility & it looks promising: the Applescript "media item" object in Photos has a writable name (title) property & a read-only filename one, so at least in theory it should be possible to write a script that runs through every "media item" object & replaces any with a "missing value" name property with some form of the filename one.

But titles & filenames are actually two very different things.

That is clear, R C-R.

But, if I understood thedatadude correctly, the edited title contains intentionally the original filename including the filename extension as part of the title, in addition to a further comment.  I am doing the same; the photo titles I assign include the full filename plus extension, because the file format of the photo is to me as important as the content of the photo. The edited titles are missing, because Photos seems to mistake them for the original filenames.

léonie wrote:

But, if I understood thedatadude correctly, the edited title contains intentionally the original filename including the filename extension as part of the title, in addition to a further comment.

But if the filename was edited in the Finder, doing that won't add an embedded title to the file. And if it was done in iPhoto, it still won't add one to the original photo file, only to a file exported in a file format iPhoto supports embedding the title in. Apparently, iPhoto only supports that only for the jpeg format.

In general, iPhoto won't change anything in the original file (the 'master' file in the iPhoto Library package if the 'import into iPhoto' preference is used or the file in its original location in the file system if it is not). Normally, that is a desirable feature, since it preserves the integrity of the original no matter how it is edited. In this situation, it is not.

But if the filename was edited in the Finder, doing that won't add an embedded title to the file. And if it was done in iPhoto, it still won't add one to the original photo file, only to a file exported in a file format iPhoto supports embedding the title in. Apparently, iPhoto only supports that only for the jpeg format.

That is not the original question. When we migrate from iPhoto or Aperture to Photos, the titles we added to the photos as metadata tags using the annotation tools (batch change, Info panel) in iPhoto or Aperture are supposed to be migrated, just like the captions.

But as clearly shown by the OP, Photos removed titles that have been added this way - all added titles that look syntactically like filenames, because the title contains a filename extension.

I call that a bug, if Photos is performing censorship on the titles we add to our photos and suppresses certain titles.

I have this similar problem with organizing photos too. I have thousands of photos suppose to be sorted by title, so browsing in an event / album will be better of.

iPhoto set filename as title automatically, but title is missing in Photos. I aware that title is part of metadata, but I still need an easy way to batch set title to all photos.

The easiest way in iPhoto, is batch changing filename, so when importing, filename will be set as title automatically. But Photos works differently.

Manually set title in thousands of photos collection is not practical.

If anyone know any way or scripts to convert filename to title metadata or batch change title for Photos, it would be great and should be a very useful tool for everyone too. So, I'm looking forward for any reply.

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.

That is an idea.

I experimented a bit, and with Apple Script we could make it a bit simpler, directly in Photos: This will save the installation of exiftool and the necessity to export the files. This way the lossless workflow will be preserved.

Create an Automator action, that executes an Apple Script to change the titles to the filename, if the title is empty:

The Apple Script:

on run {input, parameters}

tell application "Photos"

activate

set imageSel to (get selection)

if imageSel is {} then

error "Please select an image."

else

repeat with im in imageSel

set title to the name of im

if not (exists (title)) then

set the name of im to the filename of im

end if

end repeat

end if

end tell

return input

end run

Launch Automator, create a new service, and drag a "Run Apple Script" action into the workflow.

Copy and paste the text above into the "Run Apple Script" action to replace the default text in the action.

Save this workflow with a suitable name.  It will be installed in the services.

• Now launch Photos and select a few test images.
• Open the "Photos Menu > Services".
• The service should be shown in the menu - I saved  my version as "filename2title".
• Select the service to let it run. When you click the selected photos again, the titles should change.

After the Automator action completed:

.

Worse than that - all of my iPhoto albums are now one album of 50 gigs of photos!!!! Ten years of photos in one album. I am expected to now divide all those photos into the albums they were in before. I don't think so! What use is a piece of software that undoes all the work I have done before? Not even a toy. Useless.

As for photo names in iPhoto - I discovered very early on that iPhoto didn't really change the file name so I always rename the file before I import it. There is no other way to ensure that the name of your photo in iPhoto is actually the name of the file. Sorry. It's one of the many reasons I have never used iPhoto as my photo editing tool.

I am having the same issue.  In my case I scanned over 9000 old family photos, negatives, transparencies etc. and had the scanner software assign file names that started with the year the picture was taken.  This allowed me to find the pictures by year, and then, using iPhoto's batch change function I was in the process of assigning new creation dates that reflected the actual year and month the picture was taken, rather than the date when it was scanned. All of these file names now show as "untitled". The original file name is now listed in info, and is unavailable for sorting.  It makes me wonder who was doing the beta testing, obviously someone who assumed all of the pictures would be original digital photos.  Definitely a bug that needs to be fixed!

léonie wrote:

But as clearly shown by the OP, Photos removed titles that have been added this way - all added titles that look syntactically like filenames, because the title contains a filename extension.

I have been doing some more checking over the last few days, & I am now reasonably certain that every photo that actually had a filename extension in its title in my iPhoto library also has it in the title imported into Photos.

By "actually," I mean that I confirmed that iPhoto was not using the filename as a substitute for the title if the photo lacked one. Sine that is difficult to determine just by looking at what iPhoto displays as the title, I wrote a short Applescript to compare iPhoto's title & image filename properties for every photo in the entire iPhoto library. I am fully confident the list it generated contains all the photos that actually have a title in iPhoto; however, since I only manually checked some of the photos on that list in Photos, I cannot say I am 100% confident they all preserved the title info.

But every one I checked did. That was about 50 out of 289 photos, including some with jpeg, png, psd, & even pct extensions, so if there really is a bug, I strongly doubt it is directly related to filename extensions.

But every one I checked did. That was about 50 out of 289 photos, including some with jpeg, png, psd, & even pct extensions, so if there really is a bug, I strongly doubt it is directly related to filename extensions.

That is a thorough examination!

I still do not see clearly what is going on.

I simply tested with a new iPhoto Library, imported two new photos, that never had metadata assigned, changed the title in iPhoto's title field by adding a prefix to the full filename with extension. I added a third photo, where I removed the filename extension from the title field.

When I migrated this test library to Photos, only the last photo did show a title, the other two not.

léonie wrote:

I still do not see clearly what is going on.

Neither do I. It would probably be a lot easier to figure out if iPhoto made a clear distinction between filenames & titles, but since it doesn't do that I had to resort to using a script just to get a good idea of which was which.

Because of that, & a few other vaporous, non-definitive clues I have noticed, I am beginning to suspect the problem is in iPhoto rather than Photos, but I don't know where that might be or any idea about how to test that theory because I don't (apparently) have any photos with 'real' titles that did not show up in Photos.

It's all very frustrating!

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.