Export of unmodified originals from Photos loses camera information

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Level 1

39 points

Export of unmodified originals from Photos loses camera information

My wife's Photos DB is a mess. I'm trying to clean up a bunch of duplicates and retain as much EXIF/metadata, albums, favorites, etc. as possible. I'm at a point where exporting and doing some EXIF modifications using exiftool seems like the best path forward. Unfortunately, there's one wrinkle that's hanging me up.

I'm looking at a particular photo in Photos that "Get info" shows her camera (iPhone 8) and shooting details (Wide Camera, 28mm, f1.8). Exporting this using "Unmodified originals" does not retain the camera information in the EXIF. I've also tried using osxphotos to export, and the same thing occurs. Nothing I've tried results in the camera information being retained.

Has anyone run into this before? Any suggestions?

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 14.7

Posted on Aug 13, 2025 10:03 AM

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Answer 1

Aug 13, 2025 10:35 AM in response to Leo Butler

Leo Butler wrote:

I'm looking at a particular photo in Photos that "Get info" shows her camera (iPhone 8) and shooting details (Wide Camera, 28mm, f1.8). Exporting this using "Unmodified originals" does not retain the camera information in the EXIF.

Sounds weird. In what way is that Photos DB a mess? Or maybe the metadata info you miss has previously been nuked by some social media (Facebook, WhatsApp etc) although they usually strip almost all metadata.

If all else fails and you want camera metadata, you could write it with exiftool although writing MakerNotes tags needs extra effort (Apple:CameraType in the example below).

So what does a similar command like below output for that image?

exiftool -a -G1 -s image.heic
[IFD0]          Make                            : Apple
[IFD0]          Model                           : iPhone 8
[IFD0]          HostComputer                    : iPhone 8
[ExifIFD]       FocalLengthIn35mmFormat         : 28 mm
[ExifIFD]       LensInfo                        : 3.99mm f/1.8
[ExifIFD]       LensMake                        : Apple
[ExifIFD]       LensModel                       : iPhone 8 back camera 3.99mm f/1.8
[Apple]         CameraType                      : Back Wide Angle
[snip]

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Answer 2

léonie

Level 10

200,183 points

Aug 14, 2025 02:25 AM in response to Leo Butler

Quite a few of my older originals lost some metadata in iCloud, either the "Camera Model Name" or the "Lens" tag.

This happened after the upgrade to macOS 10.15 Catalina, when Apple replaced the originals by renamed originals with unique names. It might have been my fault, because it only applied to old scans, where I manually had added camera model and lens tags.

In the first version of Catalina even the capture date has been missing from the originals in the library, but has been added by Photos back on export.

When I use an external editor - any version of Luminar on my Mac, the Lens tag camera model will not be saved by Luminar to the edited version.

This also happens, when I am using "Into Live" on the iPhone. The new Live Photo will not have all metatadata tags.

Since macOS Sequoia Photos is not showing the Lens information for any of the photos taken with my Panasonic Lumix FZ300. But also for many iPhone photos. I noticed, that the iPhone 15 Pro Max photos without Lens Tags in the originals are the photos I transferred with Air Drop from my iPhone to the Mac, because the iCloud syncing has been too slow. The versions transferred by iCloud Photos had kept the Lens tags. All of my iPhone photos without Lens tags have been taken either as Live Photos or Portrait Mode photos.

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Answer 3

Aug 14, 2025 07:43 AM in response to léonie

léonie wrote: Quite a few of my older originals lost some metadata in iCloud, either the "Camera Model Name" or the "Lens" tag.

Interesting. While I have thousands of pictures with no Camera Model, almost all seem to be from scans, from Messages, or from digital pictures taken before cameras included such information. For those and others, their missing information seems legitimate.

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Answer 4

Leo Butler Author

Level 1

39 points

Aug 13, 2025 01:23 PM in response to Matti Haveri

Thanks for the quick reply. Regarding the messy DB, my wife had not been using iCloud for a long time, and was backing up to her Mac. When I got a family plan, she started doing backups to iCloud from the iPhone but left her Mac disconnected from it. At some point she enabled it, but the computer was becoming unresponsive during sync so she disabled it. Things were left in a weird state. Later I set about getting things cleaned up and I re-enabled iCloud sync, but that created the duplicates and triplicates, and there are about 8K photos out of 48K that have the wrong filetype (Photos says file is JPEG, exiftool says it's HEIC). So needless to say, it's a royal mess, and I'm still finding oddities like this export issue that complicate my efforts.

At the end of the day, if some photos are missing most of their exif/metadata and all we have for them is the date the picture was taken, that will suffice. What I've seen is that the exif often doesn't have the "Create Date" or "Date/Time Original", but if I enable the "Export IPTC as XMP" option, there's a line with "photoshop:DateCreated" and I can use a script with exiftool to stuff that into the JPEG/HEIC. I will unfortunately lose some live photos with this method as Photos won't reassemble a HEIC/MOV into a single live HEIC without more metadata to work with, but maybe that's something I can use exiftool for as well once I discover the necessary fields.

I don't think I'd be up for hand crafting the camera info; that would be far too manual to look up for each picture for which this specific situation exists. But it's very nice to know it's doable!

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Answer 5

Leo Butler Author

Level 1

39 points

Aug 14, 2025 12:26 PM in response to léonie

I decided to try a repair on my Photos DB, and it spent a half hour or so, mostly "Restoring". After it was done, the photos that had some camera information reported with "Get info" now have nothing. I opened up a copy of the DB on another computer, and the data is indeed shown for the same pics. Alas.

I used osxphotos debug-dump and I can see the camera info in the debug output. So it's not impossible to access the info. I think I'll need to post about this on the subreddit for that tool to inquire further.

One follow-up question - I need to restore my backup of the un-repaired photosdb. Should I turn off iCloud sync before doing that?

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