HDR Media Type and Photo Indicator

In macOS 10.12 Sierra and earlier it used to be possible to drag custom smart albums among Apple's predefined albums. But is no longer possible in Photos 4.0 on Mojave. I created my own folder "My Media Types" and put a smart album with the rule "Photo is HDR" into this folder.

Making the HDR badge overlay show on the photos is possible, if you install exiftool (ExifTool by Phil Harvey)

You have to set the EXIF tag "CustomRendered" to the value 3 for "HDR" (https://sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/TagNames/EXIF.html).

Install exiftool, then open a Terminal window.

Type the command below into the Terminal window and add a space character at the end of the line:

/usr/local/bin/exiftool -overwrite_original_in_place -preserve '-CustomRendered=HDR'

Then drag the image file you want to modify from the Finder window directly behind the Terminal command (on the same line) and hit the return key. When you now import the photos to Photos, they will show the HDR badge, even if the HDR has not been created with the iPhone:

The Terminal Command can be captured as a Quick Action to be run from the Finder preview.

You can create it using Automator:

The Quick Action needs an action "Get Selected Finder Items" followed by a "Run Apple Script" action.

Paste this into the Apple Script part:

on run {input, parameters}

(* Your script goes here *)

tell application "Finder"

set sel to the selection

set p to sel as alias

set pospath to POSIX path of p

do shell script "/usr/local/bin/exiftool -overwrite_original_in_place -preserve '-CustomRendered=HDR' " & pospath

-- set the clipboard to pospath

return pospath

end tell

return input

end run

Save the Quick Action in the Services folder of the User Library folder.

Now you can select a photo in the Finder (exactly one photo) and run it from the Quick Action section in the preview of the image:

I love the quick actions in Mojave!