Photos App Album strangeness

[DaveWT]

My grandson came over with his new DGI drone and demonstrated it by flying a sortie over our backyard, snapping a few photos of us. He was using his dad's iPhone (attached to its controller) to control it, so the photos were then sent to me in a Message. I moved them from there to my Mac Mini's Photos app, where they displayed properly. When I open one of these in Photos and click on the "info" icon it shows the long filename: (eg. dji_fly_20230813_172334_55_1691972646988_photo_optimized), it shows a file type of HEIF, it shows the correct location of our house on the map there, and it also shows a notation: "Shared with you by Dxxx Rxxxxx in Messages". Absolutely no problem here with the photo in my Photos Library.

The strangeness happened when I was dragging a few photos from my Photos Library into an existing album in Photos. None of the drone photos would go in. At first I thought maybe it was the long filename to blame so I dragged one of the offending drone photos to my desktop, changed the filename and dragged it back onto the Photos icon in the Dock. The resulting photo in the Library could then be dragged into the album. But further investigations showed that by dragging the photo from Photos to the desktop and then back into Photos, it removed the location info, removed the "shared" notation and changed the file format from HEIF to JPEG, so I may never know what was the real culprit in keeping these originals from being put into my album.

But the real mystery to me is that if the photos were good enough to get into the Library, and display the photo and all its info correctly, why shouldn't it be allowed into an album also (since it doesn't really go there anyway!)?

Dave

 

[chas_m]

The photos were shot in High Efficiency Image Format (HEIF). When you drag a photo out of Photos onto the desktop, the assumption is that you're doing this to share them, and so apparently Apple creates a JPG copy, which contains less information for privacy reasons.

As for your other issue, I'm not sure why the photos wouldn't go into the album in the usual dragging way, but next time try right clicking the photo and choose add to album (and then specify which album) and see if that works. Photos definitely supports HEIF (aka HEIC) as well as JPEG.

 

[DaveWT]

Thanks Chas,
I understood the business of dragging to the desktop converting to JPEG. It was the matter of the original not going into the album that has me baffled.

So I tried a new test. I created a new Album and dragged one of my "normal" photos there. It shows up in the new Album. Then I right clicked on one of the "problem" photos and tried to add it to my test album. A new dialog popped up:



I had no idea what this was about. But I decided to click on "Save". It immediately removed that photo I was trying to put in the album FROM MY LIBRARY! I looked in Recently Deleted and it is not there! No idea where it went.

Dave