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lukekurtis Author

Level 1

14 points

Question about IMG_EXXXX.JPG files and .AAE sidecar files

I'm posting about some behavior I see with the camera on my iPhone. This may be nothing new, but in all my years of being a photo-heavy iOS user, I have never run across this before. It may be that I just started doing something different to make me notice these things. However, I've been trying to make sense of it all and just wanted to describe what I see with an example in case anyone else might find it useful. And hopefully, I can learn something in the process!

I'll start by saying that I am a Lightroom user. I mostly treat my iPhone as a camera and not an editing tool. That is to say, any editing I do to photos on the iPhone I consider temporary, knowing I will lose those edits when I import the images into Lightroom. All my serious editing takes place in Lightroom anyway, so this is not a problem for me.

Recently I noticed that instead of those edits being lost, a duplicate .JPG with the edits has been appearing. I never saw this in the past.

Let me walk you through an example with some screenshots to make this clearer.

The first screenshot is from my iPhone and shows my Camera Roll. I have circled two photos. You can see that it is two slightly different photos of the same thing, taken at the same time. I made some edits using Photos on iOS to one of these photos.

The second screenshot is from my Mac. It shows the same photos on the phone via Image Capture. However, it shows THREE photos instead of two. Since I can see file names when looking at Image Capture, I notice one of the images has an "E" inserted into it, which--I'm guessing--indicates that it is an "edit" since I did, as I mentioned, indeed edit one of those photos. But I have never noticed these "E" photos in the past. So I am wondering, is this a new thing on iOS 11? Or have I somehow just not noticed it all these years? I tried searching online for other posts of people talking about these "E" files, but can't find any reference to it. This is part of what makes me think this is new behavior.

When I go to import these three photos (using Image Capture), I get the three .JPG's, as expected. I also get three .MOV files because these were live photos. Additionally, I get one .AAE file, which I know is the sidecar file that records the edits I made. But as with the "E" image file, I don't recall seeing these .AAE files being pulled in by Image Capture in the past. But I see people talking about them online in posts that aren't recent, so I'm pretty sure this isn't new. I'm just not sure how I hadn't noticed them before now.

So, I guess my question is: Have edits been being saved as these "E" files all along when using Image Capture? And has Image Capture also always imported .AAE files?

If anyone can shed some light on that question, that would be helpful. And maybe this information, in general, will be of help to some other folks out there too.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.5), null

Posted on Dec 2, 2017 9:02 PM

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7 replies

Level 10

194,871 points

Dec 3, 2017 10:14 AM in response to lukekurtis

But what about the actual "E" JPG files which, destructively (from what I am seeing) contain the edits made in Photos for iOS? Have you ever seen these before?

The first time ever I have seen the "E" JPG files was after the iOS 11 upgrade. Then the old edits (with the filters Chrome, Instant, ) could no longer be recreated in a lossless way and the migration created a second quasi master file to save the filter effect. You cab discard these "E" JPG files by using "revert to original. That will get rid of them, if you do not want to keep the edited version. Any new effect you apply in iOS will just create a new AAE file, as far as I can tell, no additional quasi master. High Sierra can handle the new iOS effects and understands the .AAE files.

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Level 10

194,871 points

Dec 3, 2017 10:01 AM in response to lukekurtis

I have seen plenty of .AAE files before the iOS 11 upgrade.

When I imported photos from my iPhone 5s with Image Capture, all photos had an .AAE sidecar file, if I had a camera filter (Chrome or Instant) applied to the image. When I imported the photos with the Photos.app, Photos for Mac applied the filters described in the .AAE file in a lossless way. I could revert to the original and discard the Chrome filter or other filters. but the other edits have not been included in the .AAE files, only the camera filters. Photos for Mac is storing the sidecar files in the Masters folder of the library on import and applies them, but does not show the sidecar files in the library:

After the iOS '11 upgrade, the old filters Chrome, etc., are gone. When I now import an older photo with the Chrome filter applied from an iOS device, I am seeing a second masterfile with the Chrome effect burned in, in addition to the original master filefile. But the new filters, that have been introduced with iOS 11, still create .AAE files, describing the new effects.

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lukekurtis Author

Level 1

14 points

Dec 3, 2017 10:03 AM in response to léonie

Thanks so much—that's very helpful. So, I obviously just have overlooked any .AAE sidecar files in the past. Which is kind of what I expected, but I just wanted to confirm. For what it's worth, also, I don't ALWAYS use Image Capture to import. Sometimes I just let the Dropbox Mac app import the photos. And Dropbox, I am very certain, does NOT import the .AAE sidecar files. So this is most likely why I am not accustomed to seeing them.

But what about the actual "E" JPG files which, destructively (from what I am seeing) contain the edits made in Photos for iOS? Have you ever seen these before?

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lukekurtis Author

Level 1

14 points

Dec 3, 2017 1:13 PM in response to léonie

That would make sense, except that I took these photos (the ones you can see in my screenshots) AFTER I upgraded to iOS 11. But it's odd that you aren't seeing the same "E" JPG files. I'll try to do some more testing to see if I can determine what circumstances do/don't cause these "E" JPG files to be created.

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lukekurtis Author

Level 1

14 points

Dec 4, 2017 7:55 AM in response to léonie

I'm definitely not using photo editing extensions or third party apps.

I just did a simple test. I took a photo with the Camera app. I then attached it to my Mac to take a look in Image Capture. There's only one JPG file, as there should be.

Then I went to Photos (on iOS) to make a simple edit: I taped Edit > Magic Wand icon > Done. After that, I hooked up the phone to my Mac again and looked in Image Capture. The "E" photo is now there (in addition to the master JPG)! I also tested importing those two photos and, as expected, it imports both JPG's plus a single .AAE file (that goes with the non-E version), for a total of three files.

I'm just very confused about why these "E" edits have started appearing. I mean, it's not a problem... if I don't want to keep the edits, I can just delete the E files. But when you multiply this times 100's or 1000's of photos (it is not uncommon for me to travel and then come home with 1000's of photos), it becomes a bit unwieldy.

At any rate, it seems to me that editing the photos causes these E files to appear. But I'm just not sure why you aren't experiencing the same thing. So it makes it a bit mysterious. :-/ I haven't yet upgraded to the new iOS 11.2 that just came out, so I guess I will do that and see if anything changes.

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lukekurtis Author

Level 1

14 points

Dec 4, 2017 7:59 AM in response to lukekurtis

For what it's worth, I repeated the above test with a new photo. This time I adjusted the Exposure manually (instead of using that Magic Wand/Auto Enhance... as I started to think maybe the "Auto Enhance" is what's creating the E files). But the test had the same results, and the "E" JPG still appears. So it's not an Auto Enhance-specific thing.

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Level 10

194,871 points

Dec 3, 2017 11:41 PM in response to lukekurtis

Are you perhaps using photo editing extensions? I'm only using basic adjustments built into photos.

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Question about IMG_EXXXX.JPG files and .AAE sidecar files

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