Non-Portrait Photos Appear As Uneditable Portraits In Photos

Just bumping, hoping someone still might answer. Since originally creating this thread I have found a total of six photos in my Photos library that all have the word PORTRAIT stamped on them. On all six, none of them have any options in edit mode for adjusting the... well, whatever portrait mode adjusts. The F-stop? The aperture?

I would really like to just get rid of, or delete, or remove, or do whatever I need to do to these six photos to stop the stupid PORTRAIT word from being stamped on them when viewing them in Photos.

In desperation, I purchased an EXIF editor named Photos Exif Editor.app, and decided to try scrubbing all of the metadata from one of the affected files. I figured out how to locate the master JPEG files in the originals folder, and I used the app to remove ALL of the metadata... everything: comments, dates, Exif, GPS, etc., etc. When I re-opened the photo in photos, the metadata was definitely gone because the photo was rendering upside down (the "rotate 180 degrees" value had been scrubbed from the orientation metadata field). However, that ****** PORTRAIT stamp still appeared on photo preview!

At this point, I just want to get that stupid PORTRAIT stamp off these half dozen or so photos! It shouldn't be this hard, darn it! Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Well, after many many weeks of screwing with this, I finally found a solution (although it isn't very good).

Basically, it appears that once a photo is taken with the "Portraits in Photo Mode" option turned on, THERE IS NO PRACTICAL WAY on the Mac platform to scrub whatever data or metadata is embedded in the photo that causes it to show up with the "PORTRAIT" label in Photos. In my case, I didn't even have the options for editing the "PORTRAIT" parameters of the photo, which I guess are supposed to blur the background. Or something.

Anyway...

If you don't care about the portrait feature and don't want to use it (or, as in my case, you can't use it because Photos doesn't offer you the option to do so) the only way I found to strip the "PORTRAIT" attribute from the photo is to transfer it to a Windows PC, open it in the Paint 3D app, and save it. That's it. That simple. If you import the saved photo back into Photos, it will be stripped of all metadata and it will NOT have the "PORTRAIT" label on it. Note that as of November 4, 2024, Microsoft has discontinued the Paint 3D application, so if you don't have access to a Windows PC that already has it, it may be hard to get. Also, once copied back to a Mac, you may have to use a terminal utility like 'touch' to reset the timestamp on the file to be the same as the original file. Otherwise the photo may show up out of chronological order in Photos.

In retrospect, I suspect that perhaps if I had been a bit more thorough in my study and use of the EXIF editor app I downloaded (see previous post), I might have stumbled across the correct metadata to delete that would've made the "PORTRAIT" label go away. On the other hand, given that I'm using a $1000 smartphone and a $2000 desktop computer, should I have had to?

Once again: shame on you, Apple. This time for defaulting to "on" a feature I don't want, and making it ridiculously difficult to disable it and remove the embedded metadata.