Tahoe Finder Missing Video Duration in Detailed Info

In the Finder you can Control click in the columns header area and add in the Duration..

.from the contextual menu drop down. It might well take time to populate, much like Size.

re: macOS 26 Tahoe

if no insight or resolve I would definitely file a bug report / submit your Apple Feedback here: Product Feedback - Apple

[Edited by Moderator]

FWIW. I have a number of video files on a 16GB flash drive formatted as APFS. Duration is blank on both Sequoia & Tahoe. The same files show the duration on the internal drive of my iMac Pro running Sequoia, but not on my M3 iMac running Tahoe.

You can send Apple a bug report from the feedback page.

Feedback - macOS - Apple

Ok. I just downloaded a 5+ GB MP4. After about ten minutes, I checked both Finder Get Info, Finder Preview settings, and the command-line mdls output for the video and no duration was available. ExifTool v13.37 showed the duration.

Tested: Tahoe 26.0.1

This is either a bug in macOS Tahoe or Apple decided to change the information shown. To have Apple consider your feedback, submit it here:

Feedback - macOS - Apple

Here's the Get Info window of the same movie file, top is Tahoe and bottom is Sequoia.

Note that as a workaround, you can open the video in QuickTime Player and use the Inspector (Command-I or View menu > Show Movie Inspector) to view the info that used to be shown in Finder > Get Info.

The duration is in kMDItemDurationSecond

FWIW, in Tahoe, when I run the Terminal command on various mp4s, kMDItemDurationSecond is not listed.

It's possible that Apple dropped the mp4 mdimporter or it doesn't work. The files with missing metadata have been reprocessed with the new or no importer and the data has been stripped.

I just looked at both mp4s with ExifTool and they both contain metadata.

I ran mdimport on the not-showing mp4 and it didn't import anything into Apple's extended attributes.

I then ran mdimport on the mp4 that was showing metadata and it cleared the Apple metadata.

Running mdimport with debugging option turned on indicates it returned 28 attributes.

It appears the metadata importer for mp4's either doesn't work or is missing.

Duration showing on my machine [on an external drive]:

This may help: If you put the video files in a folder that contains Movie in its name,

you can add Duration in list view:

Duration shows in Column view, Gallery view & the Preview pane in a Finder window.

In Gallery view if you hover cursor over image, duration shows below frame:

as that would mean macOS would need Adobe services to show basic file details.

Duration is not a basic file detail. It is content-based metadata. An mp4 should be generic, but any adobe content would require a metadata importer for their files.

All of my m4v and an mp4 music video has a duration in the preview and Get Info. I would imagine whatever created those files failed to add the metadata.

I do have a single mp4 created from a pixie cam on a RPi that does not show any metadata. I don't know how it was transferred to my Mac. If I look at the metadata on the file, it just has the standard file system data, no content metadata.

The issue is that this wasn't a problem what so ever until this update. And it makes no sense what so ever.

It's still not a problem for me, though not having it isn't a problem for me.

I don't know what is different on my Mac. If you at some point transferred them via ExFAT, that would strip all the metadata.

See if the metadata exists. In Terminal, enter "mdls " No quotes with a space after it. Drag a file into the Terminal window and hit return.

The duration is in kMDItemDurationSecond

There is also this data:

kMDItemMediaTypes

kMDItemPhysicalSize  

kMDItemPixelHeight   

kMDItemPixelWidth    

kMDItemProfileName   

kMDItemStreamable    

kMDItemTotalBitRate  

kMDItemVideoBitRate  

Another possibility is if the files are in the cloud and not downloaded. I don't know why they can't cache the data in the index, but they don't.

I just discovered this issue: M2 Ultra, Tahoe 26.0.1.

If I look at the mp4 files in Bridge, the duration and sizes are there. But they don't show up in the Finder Preview or the Get Info panel. They also do not show up if I place them in the HD>Users>me>Movies folder as suggested. What is weird is that videos made in August (before updating to Tahoe) stopped showing the data where they once did. But videos made last year DO show the data.

Flarius wrote:

I have a new external harddrive that is mentioned to be for Macs, I didn't suspect that to cause any issues, but at this point it is a possibility. If I transferred the files from my internal to that external, it is possible that that meta data was deleted at that point.

Only if the drive was formatted ExFAT or something that doesn't have resource forks. macOS will split off the metadata into ._ files so that they can be reattached to the file if copied back to a Mac formatted drive.

Though when downloading a new .mp4, I don't see the duration so that removes that possibility.

Unless of course there is something wrong with that website's data.

I had created some movies in Adobe Premier Pro and the duration doesn't show up for those, but can't say if that is the same issue or it's something with Adobe. That is likely what made Apple support think it was something on Adobe's end.

I don't think me having an M1 chip would make a difference compared to the newer models either. Only thing I can really think of is there was an issue during installation.

See my updates on the last post. I think there is something wrong with the metadata importer or with how the data is handled when imported. It seems that mdimport finds the data, but it doesn't get written to the macOS metadata.

Since the Tahoe update, I've also been having problems with video metadata. I always use Finder in column view with a preview column. Before the Tahoe update, all metadata, including duration and codec, was visible in the preview column under the video thumbnail. Now, only filename, MPEG-4 movie, size, Created, Edited, and Opened are visible.

When I open the preview options and check all the options, the metadata titles with empty values ​​appear in the preview column. When I close the preview options window, the metadata titles with empty values ​​disappear from the preview column.

[Edited by Moderator]

Indeed, this is also the case for me. All the metadata for all the videos on my external and internal drives has disappeared after Spotlight indexing.

And I'm not just talking about the duration, but also about codec and dimensions, among other things. I can retrieve this information with other apps, such as Scoop.

No metadata is added to new videos.

I have a Mac Mini M2.

I have the same problem and for those people saying they don’t have the issue, you just might not realize it. Most of my videos had the metadata when I first updated but when I added new videos I noticed it wasn’t showing things like duration or other info. So I had Spotlight re-index my drive and that’s when it disappeared for all my videos. So I suggest downloading a new video and see if the info is there to see if you have the issue.

I have Tahoe 26.0 on an M4 Mac Mini and after the Tahoe 26 update I have the same issue as everyone else here.

MP4 data for Dimensions and Duration are missing in Get Info.

Some videos did have them, but after I reset spotlight they lost the data aswell.

this is serious issue for me as I need to organise and search videos by duration and resolution all the time.