Sharing Apple Photos Library with Metadata and Persons – Three Workarounds, Seeking Feedback

[Larskarsten]

Hi Rhet and osxPhotos community,

First of all, thanks for the incredible tool! It's exactly what I needed to break open the locked box of Apple Photos and finally gain some control over my library.

I'm trying to share around 1,500 curated photos with my mother, and I’d love to preserve as much metadata as possible – especially people information (faces and assigned names). As you know, Apple Photos doesn't include face/person metadata when exporting photos via the native interface, so I'm exploring a few possible workarounds:

Option 1: Export with osxPhotos and embed people info into metadata
Using osxPhotos, I plan to export the photos and inject the names of recognized people into either:

• EXIF/IPTC keywords (e.g. Person: Mom, Dad)
• Descriptions or titles
• Possibly even the filename

This would allow my mother to at least see who’s in the photo, even if her library won’t recognize faces.

Additionally, I’m planning to add the album names as keywords or descriptions as well, since albums aren't preserved when exporting or when using shared iCloud libraries.

Option 2: Use a shared iCloud Photo Library and encode album info in metadata
An alternative idea: I share the photos with my mother via the Shared iCloud Photo Library, which does preserve people metadata (face recognition and names), but unfortunately does not preserve albums.

To compensate, I would embed the original album name into each photo’s metadata – again using description or keywords – so my mother can manually rebuild albums or search for them.

Option 3: Use an iPhone to transfer the library by switching iCloud accounts

Here’s a more experimental idea I’m considering:

1. Set up a clean iPhone and log in with my Apple ID
2. Let my entire iCloud Photo Library sync to the device
3. Then log out of iCloud but choose to keep the photos locally
4. Log in with my mother’s Apple ID

On iOS, this kind of handover seems to work for Contacts and Calendars, where the data stays local and is then merged into the new iCloud account. I’m wondering:

Would this also work for Photos?

Could the local photos be uploaded into my mother’s iCloud Photo Library automatically or manually?

If so, this could preserve people metadata and albums (since they were synced fully before the iCloud switch).

❓Question to the community:
What do you think of these three approaches?
Has anyone found a reliable way to preserve both album structure and person metadata when transferring Apple Photos to another user?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts or suggestions!
Thanks to ChatGPT supporting me in writing this post.
Lars

[RhetTbull]

Option 1: Export with osxPhotos and embed people info into metadata

OSXPhotos can certainly do this and the template system would allow you to easily embed album name, etc. into the filename. This is a core feature of osxphotos.

Option 2: Use a shared iCloud Photo Library and encode album info in metadata

This would work too as long as you don't mind including her in the shared library. You can have only one shared library so if you're already sharing with a spouse or partner your mother would see their shared photos as well. But it otherwise works well.

OSXPhotos can help here as well using the osxphotos batch-edit option. For example:

osxphotos batch-edit --verbose --keyword "{album?album:{folder_album}}" creates keywords in form album:Folder/Album for each album. The keywords sync across the shared library. If she can run osxphotos on her computer (or you can do it for her), you could run:

osxphotos batch-edit --verbose --keyword "{album?album:{folder_album}}" --album "{keyword|filter(startswith album:)|sslice(6:)}" --split-folder "/"

On both your computer then hers. This creates the album:Album keywords but then also finds any such keywords and adds those photos to albums with the original album name (creating the albums if necessary).

One caveat of the batch-edit method is that currently osxphotos batch-edit only runs on photos currently selected in the Photos app so you need first select all the photos then run the command. For large numbers of photos this process is very slow as it interacts with Photos via AppleScript which is slow. I have in the OSXPhotos roadmap a plan to improve this so you don't need to first select the photos.

The above command can be run periodically on each machine to sync changes.

Option 3: Use an iPhone to transfer the library by switching iCloud accounts

This seems complicated and prone to error. It should work in theory but it'll only work if the phone can store the originals (you have a phone large enough to sync your entire library) and it assumes Apple won't detect these photos belong to another user and refuse to sync. I think it will work but you'd want to do some careful testing. This process makes me nervous because you could end up synching data you don't want to or accidentally deleting data you didn't intend to.

Of these options, I would use Option 2 if you don't mind the work around to copy metadata with OSXPhotos and you can occasionally run the tool on her computer.

I have a plan to eventually create a small utility that would run in the background and automatically perform this kind of metadata sync on shared library images but don't have time to complete this at the moment.

Has anyone found a reliable way to preserve both album structure and person metadata when transferring Apple Photos to another user?

I think you've hit on the only workarounds at the moment. People data can also be transferred using batch-edit by creating keywords but OSXPhotos cannot sync the actual face region/person name as Apple provides no way to programmatically do this.

One final option is the osxphotos sync command which syncs select metadata (or all metadata) in libraries. You could for example do this:

• Create a shared folder (iCloud, Dropbox, etc.) with your mother.
• On your computer, run: osxphotos sync --export /path/to/shared/folder/Lars.db --merge all --import /path/to/shared/folder/Mother.db
• On her computer, run: osxphotos sync --export /path/to/shared/folder/Mother.db --merge all --import /path/to/shared/folder/Lars.db

This effectively does the same thing as the batch-edit method but uses an intermediate database to store the metadata instead of using keywords or description field in Photos. Unfortunately it doesn't sync persons but if Shared Library does this, then you've got that covered. It does sync: keywords, albums, title, description, favorite, location.

[Larskarsten]

Wow. Thank you very much for your quick answer. I will try one or two of the methods in the next days and weeks and will let you know.

[Larskarsten]

Hi @RhetTbull,

Just wanted to share my experience – everything worked in the end, and I now have my full photo library, including albums, person tags, and metadata, successfully synced to a new iOS device under a different user account.

Here’s what I did:

• Quit Photos on my Mac and made a full copy of my Photos library.
• Opened the copy and deleted all photos I didn’t want to transfer.
• Emptied the “Recently Deleted” album to fully remove them.
• Created a new user account on the Mac and copied the slimmed-down library to that user’s Pictures folder.
• Opened the library there (holding down the Option key when launching Photos) and set it as the System Photo Library.
• Set up the iOS device with the new Apple ID and connected it to iCloud Photos.
• Took a test photo on the iOS device to verify the libraries would merge correctly.
• Upgraded iCloud storage to allow full sync.
• Then I let it sync overnight – around 3,000 photos were uploaded from the Mac and downloaded to the iOS device.

Now everything is in place:

• My selected photos (with metadata like albums, people, and locations) are on the new iOS device under a new Apple ID.
• The test photo from the iPhone wasn’t lost in the process.

It was a bit of a manual process, but it worked well and was worth the effort for this larger transfer.
For future transfers with smaller libraries, I’ll definitely give osxPhotos a try directly – it looks like a great tool for targeted exports.

Thanks to you and the community for your help and guidance!

Best regards,
Lars