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First off, make a duplicate of the cleaned up Library so whatever happens you have that.
If the Library was created by syncing up with iCloud and it “knows” your library, then reconnecting should apply all the changes you’ve made to the library. it may take some time to settle out, but it should do that.
If you cleaned up a copy of the client’s library then the surest way to replace is to delete everything from the existing photos library and let that sync (delete) from all the devices (of course, the client library is backed up to Time Machine). Then you replace the (old) empty one with yours and replace everything in the ecosystem.
Cindy – Are you looking at the File creation date in the Finder or the Exif Capture date in Preview, Photos, or Lightroom? If you save the image directly into Photos or Open in Preview it should still be correct.
You are asking the right question. Namely, are the clients you serve happy Apple Photos users or not? Thankfully, we are long past the infant days of digital photo organizing when software came and went overnight and the many happy iPhoto/Aperture users were poorly transitioned to a less-than-satisfying Photos 1.0. Apple is now the most valuable company in the world and a large part of its success is because of it’s photo/video ecosystem that makes every new generation of iPhone a “must have” purchase. The notion that Photos will be discontinued and users forced to migrate their collections overnight to other software is wildly unrealistic. In fact, at least 2 solutions for easy extraction of metadata rich originals are in development and it’s almost certain that those options will improve with time. The point is that there are 2 kinds of clients – those who do not understand how to use Apple Photos or are seeking a different feature set/user experience and will benefit from extraction and integration with another system, and those who bought into the Apple ecosystem for the ease of use and rich imaging experience it promises. For the latter, it’s a legitimate and proper business model to offer and support as I and many others in the photo management community have found.
Adam – A follow up questions is whether you have looked at the images synced to a PC from iCloud for Windows? It seems like Apple would try to keep the file consistent with iCloud but I’m not sure. Wondering if that would be a JPEG with embedded metadata.
Oh, Adam. My apologies. I see that the successful files are .HEIC which Adobe is seeing as RAW and treating accordingly. That was sloppy testing on my part.
My thoughts though are that these days, with storage getting cheaper and cheaper, isn’t exporting a larger, uncompressed (Maximum quality) JPEG with metadata the least intrusive solution to getting a file with embedded metadata out of Photos? It is smaller than a .tiff and what it gives up in storage it saves the client the time and cost to duplicate that lost metadata. If it’s that important to get out of Photos?
Adam – What are some examples of faulty Apple .xmp. I’ve done Original + sidecar for years without incident. I just tested again with LR Classic, LRCC, and Bridge and get the same results: Title maps to Title; Description maps to Description or Caption; People Tag maps to Keyword, and all the keywords are intact. Apple has been as big a supporter of file and standards as anyone in the business.
Hi Ana – I think you’ve got it. In fact, when you sign out of the old Apple ID you will probably get a prompt about whether you want to save the Notes, Calendar, etc. on the device. Then they can be synced to the new ID. Just be sure that the Photos are at Original size, not Optimized. Does she have her own computer, or just iPhone?
Hi Amanda – Rather than pulling originals out of the Library package, just select images and use File > Export > Export Unmodified Originals . . . and you can get the photos with all the metadata intact in a much more orderly fashion. You can choose to export by groups (years, months, etc.) or Albums if you choose, or all at once. Plus you’ll get the original naming, if that matters, instead of the database name that appears in the Package folders. What will the client be using to manage their files when you’re done?
Burst photos are just need to be edited down to the frame(s) you want. Easiest to do on the Mac, you just select the burst photo and open it in Edit mode. There you’ll get a “Select” button to choose the keepers. When you finish you’ll be prompted to save all the frames or just the selected ones. Then the burst will be converted to individual still images.
Live Photos can be turned off by selecting them and choosing Image > Turn off Live Photo from the Photos menu. You’ll have to test whether that enables uploading to Amazon. And for the future, if your family is taking unwanted Live Photos, they probably have left the Camera setting on default, which always reverts to Live Photo when you launch the Camera app. To make it a manual setting, they have to go to the Camera settings and turn ON the Preserve Settings option for Live Photos. That makes the setting stick to the last used setting so if they turn it off [by touching the Live Photo symbol] then it will stay off.
The Shared Album file quality gets a bad rap, I think, because it’s not nearly as bad as we first thought. Allowing unlimited full size images in Shared Albums would choke the system and make large Shared Albums unacceptably slow to load for viewers. So the default image resize is to 2048 pixels on the long side. 5400 pixels for a panorama. For a standard format image, that gives you a 5×7 inch picture at typical photo book resolution and you can upsize it to a full page bleed on an 8.5 x 11 book without getting a low resolution error. For a photo print you can go even larger. So for typical sharing use – making 4×6 prints or adding to a page of pictures in a book – the Shared Album sizing is not much of a problem. In the case of a larger wall print or to crop into a shot, then, sure, that might warrant a better file, but as a tradeoff of convenience for quality, the Shared Albums settings aren’t a real problem. And easy alternative, though, if you really want to pass around full size images or videos is to create a Shared Folder on iCloud Drive.
Hi Patricia – If you are currently using Photos and plan to continue with Photos as your primary photo organizer then you might want to consider just doing your organizing in Photos itself. Round tripping photos just for the sake of adding keywords (you can do a fine job of de-duping in Photos with PhotoSweeper) seems like a lot of effort for the benefit. You can keyword right in Photos anyway and when you export the image it will include the keyword. It looks like you already have the organizing done.
Try this: Hold down Option and when you click on the Time Machine icon in the menu bar you’ll get “Browse other disks.” Choose the disk and you’ll be launching into a Time Machine browse view. The Finder window works just like it does on your hard disk. Click into the column view so you get a preview image of content and type a letter in the Search window (or something in the title if the client can remember). That will bring up the complex search tool (you can delete text in the “search” now). and you can search on “kind is movie”. You can try adding another line with “created date is after XXXX” and an another with “created date is before XXXX” to narrow to a range, but old video files sometimes had the date stamps in odd places so that may not help. There’s also an option in “Other” for “year recorded” that I’ve never used. You will likely get a lot of videos and have to scroll through. In column view you’ll get a preview in the right column when you click on one and using the spacebar you can launch a preview of the clip. If it’s what you want you can right-click on the file and chose “Restore to . . .” to put it on your desktop or a collection folder. I’ll post this to the forum too. Let me know how if it works.
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