Sequoia Preview removes keywords when I resize an image

I just opened a JPG with EXIF data in Preview on Tahoe 26.0.1. The Preview Inspector displays (🔍) the three keywords that are in that image.

Without resizing the image, I can Save As… to foo.tiff and the keywords remain in the original image and are in the TIFF image. When I repeat the previous sentence, but this time to foo.jpg, you can watch the keywords disappear in the Preview Inspector for the original image and are missing in foo.jpg.

I also tested resizing and rescaling this image followed by a Save As… to foo.tiff and the keywords were not in that saved image and were also removed from the original.

Send direct feedback to the macOS product team. No Apple employees participate here, and that feedback is the only means that they can become aware of this Preview flaw in Tahoe. It likely won't get fixed until some release after Tahoe 26.1 owing to developmental schedules. I recommend that you use a third-party tool for your images to get past this issue and preserve the original image content.

Apple provides a Terminal command line tool named Scriptable Image Processing System (SIPS). It is an alternative to Preview for adjusting the size (dimensions) of an image without damaging the EXIF data such as keywords. The free ExifTool is another alternative but is far more complicated (and powerful) than SIPS.

I just took a 1920x1200 JPG with three keywords in it and resampled it at 1600 pixels to an output JPG. The resample automatically adapts the height to the width change. The three keywords were preserved in both JPG files.

sips --resampleWidth 1600 -o foo.jpg 02342_foo.jpg

If you enter the following command in the Terminal, it will generate a PDF man page for sips and open it in Preview:

sips --man | mandoc -Tpdf -mdoc | tee sips.pdf | open -f -a Preview

Sips supports other output formats and if you enter the following command, it will show you which ones it can write too:

sips --formats | more

CharlyIBC wrote:

When I open an image with Preview the keywords are there.

After I resize the image smaller the keywords are gone.

This never happened in previous Mac OS's and as a Pro Photographer, I need to stop this from happening. Any advise?

This appears to be a bug in Preview or in the MacOS that affects Preview.

As you are a Pro Photographer, you should consider switching to use advanced photography tools instead of software like Preview, which is a minimally featured lower end application. My daughter has a photography business and never uses Preview, she uses the Adobe Photography suite, including Photoshop and Lightroom. Preview is nice because it is free and does have many useful features, and Adobe is not inexpensive, but sometimes one gets what one pays for. (By the way, in the U.S. the cost of the Adobe software packages is tax deductible if used for business purposes.)

If Adobe Photography programs are too costly, there are other lower cost alternatives for working with jpg, raw etc. files.

That PDF is the sips man page. I provided an example usage that constrains proportions to the new size. It did not result in a color shift from the original image. I avoid AI like the plague it is… 🧐