Exporting images and metadata from Mac Photos

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michaelp

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Asking for someone who has 1,000s of photographs taken for a multi-year project and needs to catalogue the work.

I’ve had a good hunt with Dr Google and there doesn’t seem to be any easy to use tools that can export metadata from Photos to Excel.

https://photostakeout.com/ seems to be able to export photos with metadata and preserve album (folder) structure.

I have found that exported photos have all the EXIF and other metadata (including keyword) embedded, so maybe one answer is to export everything from Photos and then import to Lightroom? And then use a Light plugin to export metadata to Excel?

Fireebok can export metadata to a .plist file … but what use is that because there seem to be no tools that can import Apple’s non-standard XML format into Excel (plus the trial version does not extract key words and the EXIF export does not work (seems to be disabled in Trial although according to their info it shouldn’t be))
https://www.fireebok.com/welcome-to-buy-photo-exifer.html

Any tips, suggestion, report on experience appreciated!
 
And the ExifTool.exe that ExifToolGUI sits on can read/write Office Open XML Spreadsheet files, so if you're into programming this could work.
 
I also recommend ListView or Lr Transporter.

One advantage is that you have the full power of the Library module to select your images of interest.
 
RoyReed said:
ExifToolGUI can export the Exif data as a plain text file. I don't know how easy it would be to parse this to extract the data in CSV format to import into Excel. I can supply a sample of the exported text format if you think it might be helpful. It can also export to these formats: MIE, XMP, EXIF, HTML.
Click to expand...
Roy that is a wonderful offer, thank you. I have done and still do some coding (mostly VBA) and I do use some tools via Terminal in Mac - so I have a few clues, but ExifTool looks tricky. If you were able to give me output from 5-10 images in TXT, EXIF AND XMP that would be most helpful.
 
michaelp said:
I have found that exported photos have all the EXIF and other metadata (including keyword) embedded, so maybe one answer is to export everything from Photos and then import to Lightroom? And then use a Light plugin to export metadata to Excel?

Fireebok can export metadata to a .plist file … but what use is that because there seem to be no tools that can import Apple’s non-standard XML format into Excel (plus the trial version does not extract key words and the EXIF export does not work (seems to be disabled in Trial although according to their info it shouldn’t be))
Click to expand...

If that’s literally all you need — get metadata info from Apple Photos into Excel — there might be another option.

Exiftool is powerful but command-line only, and ExifToolGUI is Windows-only. Because I have limited experience with the command line, I am wary of really screwing up photos if I type one character incorrectly. So I am always on the lookout for Mac GUI front ends for ExifTool, such as the plug-ins available for Lightroom Classic.

In cases like this, you always want to consider GraphicConverter. It’s been a useful all-purpose Mac graphics toolbox for 30 years. Less well known is that GraphicConverter is also a Mac toolbox for photo metadata — it’s another app that integrates ExifTool, behind its friendly GUI front end for metadata edits. I wondered if it might have a solution for this, so I downloaded it and tried it out briefly. it’s shareware, so you can pay after you confirm it does what you need. This is what seemed to work:
  1. Export the photos from Apple Photos, as you already know.
  2. In GraphicConverter, choose File > Browse, and use the Browse window to view the folder of exported images.
  3. In the menu bar click the Exif menu (camera icon), and choose Export ExifTool Data of Complete Folder Content Into CSV.
  4. A new .CSV file appears in the same folder.
  5. Open that in Excel. In my test it contained everything from EXIF data to the IPTC caption, keywords, etc.
In the screen shot, I left the EXIF Specifics submenu and ExifTool panels open just as an example of what this program can do.

GraphicConverter-Export-IPTC-EXIF-into-one-CSV-file.jpg


I don’t know GC all that well, but just looking at the current version, a lot has been added in recent years. There is a lot going on in the metadata menus now…I might have to buy this.
 
Conrad Chavez said:
If that’s literally all you need — get metadata info from Apple Photos into Excel — there might be another option.

Exiftool is powerful but command-line only, and ExifToolGUI is Windows-only. Because I have limited experience with the command line, I am wary of really screwing up photos if I type one character incorrectly. So I am always on the lookout for Mac GUI front ends for ExifTool, such as the plug-ins available for Lightroom Classic.

In cases like this, you always want to consider GraphicConverter. It’s been a useful all-purpose Mac graphics toolbox for 30 years. Less well known is that GraphicConverter is also a Mac toolbox for photo metadata — it’s another app that integrates ExifTool, behind its friendly GUI front end for metadata edits. I wondered if it might have a solution for this, so I downloaded it and tried it out briefly. it’s shareware, so you can pay after you confirm it does what you need. This is what seemed to work:
  1. Export the photos from Apple Photos, as you already know.
  2. In GraphicConverter, choose File > Browse, and use the Browse window to view the folder of exported images.
  3. In the menu bar click the Exif menu (camera icon), and choose Export ExifTool Data of Complete Folder Content Into CSV.
  4. A new .CSV file appears in the same folder.
  5. Open that in Excel. In my test it contained everything from EXIF data to the IPTC caption, keywords, etc.
In the screen shot, I left the EXIF Specifics submenu and ExifTool panels open just as an example of what this program can do.

View attachment 20147

I don’t know GC all that well, but just looking at the current version, a lot has been added in recent years. There is a lot going on in the metadata menus now…I might have to buy this.
Click to expand...
That's very useful thanks Conrad. I will give definitely it a trial. However, it would be great to find a tool that gets the metadata directly from the Photos database ...
 
michaelp said:
Roy that is a wonderful offer, thank you. I have done and still do some coding (mostly VBA) and I do use some tools via Terminal in Mac - so I have a few clues, but ExifTool looks tricky. If you were able to give me output from 5-10 images in TXT, EXIF AND XMP that would be most helpful.
Click to expand...
PM sent.
 
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