P. Einarsen
3/25/2019 at 12:52:05 PM GMT
Adam – I don’t believe that’s true anymore. I get it that many people don’t embrace the “walled garden” user experience of the Photos ecosystem and prefer a free range folder environment. But that’s not the same thing as saying Apple does a terrible job of supporting industry-standard metadata. Apple honors everything. Photos even finds video creation dates that don’t appear in the OS. And thanks to improved export options and 3rd party apps like Photos-to-Disk, you CAN extract images from the library with no degradation and all their metadata intact. If you want to. The thing is that as professional photo organizers, I think we need to understand where there are true technical issues and where software choice is just a matter of preferred user experience. Sorry for the pushback, Adam, but I think the Photos debate is all about user experience (for organizer and client) and leftover scars from the iPhoto years. Not for technical reasons.
A. Pratt
3/25/2019 at 6:29:07 PM GMT
Paul, I don’t mind the pushback at all. 🙂 I’m sure we can all learn new things and better ways of working from this thread. I’ve done these tests many times in the past, but I just performed them again with Photos 4 (3421.5.230) on a brand new MacBook Pro running Mojave (10.14.3) and here’s what I’m seeing: 1. Apple Photos and the Mac OS will retain IPTC/XMP metadata embedded by other software. I’ve never seen an exception to this. 2. Apple Photos can write/edit very few IPTC fields. It seems to only support keywords, description, title, and GPS. You can type whatever you want in the location field, but as far as I can tell the only location data saved is GPS coordinates. This means that address/sublocation, city, state, and country are ignored. There are hundreds of possible IPTC fields, but most of aren’t used by most folks. Two notable omissions are the creator and copyright fields. 3. If I want to embed metadata assigned with Apple Photos I must export and recompress the images. On average, this is bloating my files 45-55%. 4. If I export with XMP sidecar files I can’t find any software that will merge those files so that the metadata is viewable, searchable, or embedded in the images. I’ve tried with Lightroom Classic and Bridge and can’t get either of them to read and merge the XMP sidecar files. This thread matches my experience: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8016541 Do you know another way? 5. If I use Photos to Disk and customize the Metadata preference to embed metadata then all the metadata is embedded losslessly into the export images, EXCEPT none of the recognized people/faces tags are retained as keywords or any other metadata field. ADAM’S CONCLUSION: It’s not possible to embed industry-standard metadata into images with Apple Photos without recompressing and bloating my files. I can achieve a workaround with third-party software (Photos to Disk), but I still lose what I consider to be the most important subject: the people. These are the technical reasons I don’t think the metadata support in Apple Photos is sufficient. QUESTION: Are you seeing a different result on my points above or know an answer to my question in #4?
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