Bring Back Photo Meta Data for Shared Photos

Various email services, yours or theirs, try to preserve your privacy by extracting metadata. Here's a trick to fool them:

In Mac Photos, File>Export the pictures

to a folder in Finder on your Mac.

Then select those pictures, right-click,

and choose Compress. You'll get a universally understood zip file that you can send, and no one's mail server will mess with it. On Macs, and I suppose on Windows, you just click on it and you get a folder of fully intact pictures.

Motoman2 wrote: … they make it more difficult when asking others, many who are not too computer/phone savvy, to submit articles and photos for inclusion in club newsletters

This may be the problem with email in general. I've see some that require zip files. Texting a picture is more secure, and location and dates are included, but not other stuff like captions and titles.

I suggest that you let Apple know what you thing would benefit your club members here:

Feedback - Photos - Apple

We have seen changes made in response to suggestions there.

After receiving photos of a club event from others with no meta data I tried sending some my own photos to another email address using both iPhone and MacBook Pro using mail with photo attachments, selecting photos in the Photos app and sending by either email or Messages. The result seems to be the same, photo meta data not being included.

Motoman2 wrote: It appears that Apple has eliminated the ability to share photo metadata with its new IOS and OS systems.

There are several ways to share pictures with others. Can you let us know what method you are talking about, here? What exactly are you doing; what "buttons" are you pushing, what apps, etc?

That method requires a lot of monkey motion compared to just sending the photos like before. People that didn’t want the meta data included were able to exclude. It seems like Apple is dumbing it down for people who didn’t want to think or be responsible for their own controls.

It makes more work for the rest of us.

Have you tried to share the photos as a shared album link? One of the improved features in the new system version are the improved shared albums. we can create links to shared albums stored on iCloud Drive. There the photos will be shared with all metadata, at the full resolution, but only for thirty days. The recipients will have to copy them within this time frame.

On your Mac with macOS 27 Golden Gate you can share the photos like this

• Select the photos in your Photos Library
• ctrl-click the selected item
• click "Share"
• click "Create Shared Album link"
• Copy the link and save it somewhere so you can mail the link. It will also appear in the sidebar of of thePhotos window.

On an iPhone with iOS27 the procedure is similar.

• Select the photos to share
• Tap the Share button
• Select to create a Shared album link

Mailing the link to a Shared album has the advantage that the emails are small. The photos will be transferred in the original resolution and quality.

The responses give several options on how to overcome the obstacles built in by Apple but they make it more difficult when asking others, many who are not too computer/phone savvy, to submit articles and photos for inclusion in club newsletters (I am. an editor of two) and club photo albums, neither which would seem to be a security risk since they are post-activities rather than real time. I'll keep searching to see if there are easily described settings that can be made to include meta data.