[cianmm]

Interesting article. I have my own problem, that caused me to have to upgrade my iCloud plan, and thus may not be a high priority fix for Apple.

If you shoot RAW+JPEG (not a super-rare thing to do, for photo enthusiasts) then Apple Photos links the two images. Which is useful, rather than having a bunch of kinda-duplicates littering your library you can easily toggle between RAW and JPEG.

But this combining, along with the file system design described in this article, makes it impossible (as far as I can tell, anyway) to easily separate them and delete the RAWs. So years later, I have HUGE RAW files that I'll never touch that I can't delete, because I want to keep the much smaller JPEGS.

Any method that I've found to clean them up (exporting the originals, deleting them from the library, and then re-importing the JPEGs only seems easiest) will lose all of the years of metadata that I've built up in the library.

So I have to upgrade.

[ylk]

Possibly stupid question: why can’t the metadata be exported and imported? Is there other metadata aside from the exif data? Or does Apple not export all of it? And in case you’re talking about additional features like face recognition, doesn’t the app do that again once you imported the jpeg?

[Ayesh]

Im not in Apple ecosystem at all, so I don't have an answer to your question.

But in RAW/JPG world, the metadata and edits is already a solved problem with Sidecar files + EXIF data. Sure, EXIF fields are kinda messy but I'm sure it's better than Apple has rolled by their own.

[rhettbull]

> Any method that I've found to clean them up (exporting the originals, deleting them from the library, and then re-importing the JPEGs only seems easiest) will lose all of the years of metadata that I've built up in the library.

The open source tool osxphotos (https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos) can help with this. You can export the JPEG images while preserving metadata using the thrid-party exiftool utility:

`osxphotos export /path/to/export --has-raw --skip-raw --exiftool`

This exports all images that have a raw pair but skips the raw component then uses exiftool (https://exiftool.org/) to write the metadata (keywords, etc.) to the exported JPEG files. You can then re-import these into photos either by dragging them or by running `osxphotos import /path/to/export/*`

Both the export and import commands have many other options for controlling export directory, etc. `osxphotos help export` or `osxphotos docs` to open docs in browser. (Disclaimer: I'm the author of osxphotos)

[icebergonfire]

Not in your situation at this point, but as a photo nerd I will eventually be so I took to Google.

> Any method that I've found to clean them up (exporting the originals, deleting them from the library, and then re-importing the JPEGs only seems easiest) will lose all of the years of metadata that I've built up in the library.

Apparently when you File/Export Unmodified Originals it will export the RAW+HEIC and a separate sidecar file containing the metadata. You can then move the RAW file away and import the HEIC file, which will autoimport the sidecar metadata file too.

You lose edits though, although it seems you can "copy edits" somehow. Surely a technically inclined person can AppleScript their way through this...

Yet it seems needlessly cumbersome and should be a built-in function in Photos.app, it's clearly not prioritized because it helps funnel people into higher iCloud tiers.

[Aeolun]

> it's clearly not prioritized because it helps funnel people into higher iCloud tier

Which would be annoying by itself. But then iCloud has an arbitrary limit of 2TB as well, which does not seem to be able to be increased.

[kalleboo]

The 2 TB limit (that I've been bumping up against for nearly 2 years) has finally been raised - a few months ago they added 6 TB and 12 TB tiers

[Aeolun]

Cool! I don’t see myself needing them any time soon, but max 2TB was too close for comfort.

[maherbeg]

ugh yeah, currently in the same boat and haven't taken on the work to deal with this hassle. definitely looking for a solution!