I was recently sent a picture over iMessage and I wanted to add it to an album I have on Mac photos (which then syncs back to iPhone Photos). That all went smoothly about as well as can be expected for somebody who will not be corralled into iCloud Photos. But now my iPhone shows, in the From My Mac section, a Screenshots sub-section which contains that one photo. And also on my Mac Photos, there’s now a Screenshots category under Pinned and that show this one photo.
That photo is not a screenshot but for some reason Photos thinks it is. And Get Info confirms that it does think that way about it. Fine.
So, long story short, is there a straightforward way for me to go and edit the EXIF or some kind of other metadata in that photo file so Photos no longer considers this picture a screenshot?
It’s stored as an extended attribute. In the terminal, you can use the xattr or mdls commands to view it, and xattr to delete it. I think that if you use xattr to delete the metadata, it will update Spotlight accordingly, but I haven’t verified that.
To view: xattr <filename>
or mdls <filename> or, more specifically, mdls <filename> | grep -i screen
To delete: xattr -d com.apple.metadata:kMDItemIsScreenCapture <filename>
There are other “ScreenCapture” related entries. I don’t know if you also would need to delete those, too, substituting the relevant kMDItem* values accordingly.
Thank you. That sounded like a very elegant approach. Unfortunately, I cannot find any IsScreenCapture attributes at all.
Ironically, the first issue was finding the file at all! Photos used to offer a right-click > Show in Finder command, but apparently Apple is hell-bent on destroying workflow in Photos after they successfully did that in Music. So, instead in Photos I had to choose to edit this JPEG in Preview and then over in Preview use the old cmd-click filename in toolbar trick to find where the file is actually hidden away. Opened the parent folder and then in terminal went to that location.
Since I wasn’t able to find any meaningful attributes and since I had the photo already opened in Preview, I used that to look at the file’s meta data. Under EXIF, there is User Comment = Screen Shot. I cannot edit that in there, but is it possible that alone is making Photos consider this a screenshot? It gets even more odd though. If I look at the EXIF data for that same file in GraphicConverter, I see User Comment: Screenshot hidden away under ExifTool, but it also lists under EXIF this: Screen capture type = Standard.
Very interesting topic @Simon ! I don’t know how this generally works (as @josehill clearly does) so my “straightforward way” suggestions are more swags…
Did the sender of the image use it as a screen shot before sending to you? Perhaps they can send another version of it, before it got marked that way…?
Or could you go back to the Message and save the file again in Finder, work on it and then put it in Photos app? (I suppose it’s obvious but maybe if the image file has Screenshot in the file name, maybe changing it would do the trick (if that’s one way Photos would ID it as a screenshot)).
I was going to suggest opening the image in GraphicConverter or similar and editing the EXIF info, but you seem to have tried that; I opened a screenshot .png on my Mac and looked in the Edit EXIF Data tool there and didn’t find ‘capture’ or ‘screen’ when searching the long list of attributes, except that there was a SceneCapture that had Standard, Other, and other options as Type.
Poking around further I found Filesystem Attributes (menu or control click) > Finder Comment (Spotlight) > Edit… As you mentioned the file has a User Comment, maybe you would find it in this Edit window and be able to remove the comment…?
One of these days I’ll start a topic on From My Mac and Image Capture frustrations. Yesterday I downloaded/synced/backed up on Mac all the photos from iPhone then deleted all except the ones for current shopping/project needs. It will be only my visual note-taking short term use camera going forward, I have a separate lightweight digital camera in a belt pouch that will take over; it is much easier and more dependable in image handling.
I’m trying to dig into it a little more, and it appears that when a screenshot is made in iOS, “Screenshot” is automatically added to the EXIF UserComment field. Strangely, I don’t see that in some of my screenshots.
Upon capture, the image additionally is flagged as a “photoScreenshot”, which is read by the Photos app to categorize the image. Likewise, I don’t see that with all of my screenshots, either.
I automatically save my screen captures to Dropbox, but I don’t think that interferes with Apple’s normal metadata processing unless modifications are made to FileProvider defaults.
I wonder if I could save this file as a new file via export using say Preview of GraphicConverter and importing that fresh into Photos would get rid of the screenshot designation. Of course that’s not ideal either, because I would lose the proper creation date of the pic.
I’ve seen some comments on threads elsewhere that suggest that can work, but now that I’ve seen additional complexity, I’m uncertain. For example, would saving as a new file propagate the “photoScreenshot” flag or not? Is that flag sufficient to mark it as a screen shot, at least with respect to the Photos app? I don’t know of a tool that would allow that flag to be reset manually, but I haven’t looked either.
Edited to add:
Further investigation suggests that the presence of a “User Comment: Screenshot” EXIF tag is the most determinative factor (but not necessarily the only one) in Photos deciding how to characterize an image. The “photoScreenshot” flag is added during the Photos import process and is stored in the Photos database, but not added to the file itself.
You should be able to edit the original file using any of several methods to remove the User Comment EXIF tag, but you then will need to import it to Photos.app again, though you should delete the originally imported file from Photos and allow the deletion to propagate through iCloud to your other device(s). The process should not change the EXIF information regarding the original image’s creation date, which is what Photos should use.
Between multiple versions of the file floating around and iCloud syncing, correcting the error is more complex than it may seem at first. I decided to have an A.I. conversation about it, and several approaches were suggested. None of the individual steps were difficult, but the sequence and totality of steps probably were more than should be shared in this thread. Perhaps it would be worth having your own conversation with an A.I.
As an aside, I am reminded of the difficulty I had more than a decade ago trying to figure out how to handle incidents where iTunes improperly identified whether or not an MP3 file was a podcast. The solution ended up being relatively simple, but I had a devil of a time finding it.
Try sending it somewhere via sftp, vhich doesn’t know or care about apple metadata. I lost a whole lot of wherefroms once that way, which I fortunately didn’t care about. Fetch probably has the most control over the details of a transfer in case something tries be too smart.
I have to admit, I’m skeptical. I think so far we haven’t even established that such Apple metadata exists for this file. This is a JPEG so the metadata could just as well live in EXIF, or simply the file itself, without showing up as any extended attribute. Either way, I have not yet managed to recognize any extended attribute for this file that sounds associated with screen capture.