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Titles in photos

My titles totally disappeared on a shared album on both phone and MacBook. I have tried checking the titles under metadata and clicking the show thumbnails, neither has worked! They were definitely there, I have been looking at them for 6 months. Recently did 12.6.3 update

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 12.6

Posted on Mar 12, 2023 1:21 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Mar 13, 2023 1:17 AM

The titles should still be there in the versions of your photos, that you are keeping in your Photos Library - the versions you shared to the Shared albums, but when you share photos to Shared albums, Photos is creating special copies for the shared albums for sharing, scaled down to 2048 pixel at the longest edge and most of the metadata will be stripped. This is done, so we do not dump large files onto the devices of unsuspecting subscribers and do not accidentally give away more information than we have intended. Shared albums are nice for showing our photos to others, but not suitable for archiving our photos, because of the reduced quality and missing metadata.

I hope you kept the originals in your Photos Library and did not delete them after sharing the photos to the shared albums, or you will be stuck with the photos in reduced quality and missing metadata.

What you could try, is ctrl-clicking one of the Photos in the shared album and use the command "Import": Perhaps you can save at least the location data by reimporting the photos from the Shared albums. The data set by the camera will usually reappear after reimporting.


That the metadata in Shared albums are stripped is stated in the footnote here (in the paragraphe "File types ...": How to use Shared Albums in Photos on your iPhone, iPad and Mac – Apple Support (UK)

"Shared Albums upload a copy of your data. Downloaded content may not contain the same information as the original."



5 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Mar 13, 2023 1:17 AM in response to BBgirl8

The titles should still be there in the versions of your photos, that you are keeping in your Photos Library - the versions you shared to the Shared albums, but when you share photos to Shared albums, Photos is creating special copies for the shared albums for sharing, scaled down to 2048 pixel at the longest edge and most of the metadata will be stripped. This is done, so we do not dump large files onto the devices of unsuspecting subscribers and do not accidentally give away more information than we have intended. Shared albums are nice for showing our photos to others, but not suitable for archiving our photos, because of the reduced quality and missing metadata.

I hope you kept the originals in your Photos Library and did not delete them after sharing the photos to the shared albums, or you will be stuck with the photos in reduced quality and missing metadata.

What you could try, is ctrl-clicking one of the Photos in the shared album and use the command "Import": Perhaps you can save at least the location data by reimporting the photos from the Shared albums. The data set by the camera will usually reappear after reimporting.


That the metadata in Shared albums are stripped is stated in the footnote here (in the paragraphe "File types ...": How to use Shared Albums in Photos on your iPhone, iPad and Mac – Apple Support (UK)

"Shared Albums upload a copy of your data. Downloaded content may not contain the same information as the original."



Mar 13, 2023 11:51 PM in response to BBgirl8

Do you have a Time Machine backup, going back to the time, before you deleted the photos from your Library?

Then you could restore the older version of your library from the backup, without deleting your current library, and try to recover the tagged photos from the restored library. Chose to restore without overwriting your curent library.

See: Restore a library from Time Machine in Photos on Mac – Apple Support (UK)


Once you have an older copy of your library, you could try to import the library to your current library. Photos will check for duplicates and only show photos for import, that are not in your library. The photos will be imported with the titles and captions and adjustments, that can be reverted. See: Import photos from another library in Photos on Mac – Apple Support (UK)




Titles in photos

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