How To Get Photos Out Of the Photos App

If a photo is part of your Photo's App library, how do you get it out and use it as a regular file? There are three proper ways you can export a photo, none of which involve messing around inside the library file.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to get photos out of the Photos App. 
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In a previous video I did I explained how photos in the Photos App are in a special library. They're not files that you would normally find in the Finder. You can think of it as files and documents, those are all in a file system and use the Finder to access them. Photos in the Photos App are kind of in their own separate filing system, that is the Photos Library. You access those not in the Finder but in the Photos App which includes all sorts of Tools for you to handle special types of photos, like live photos or burst photos and also videos and do edits and adjustments and all of that. But then the question I get is how do you get files out of the Photos App.
You do this by using the Export function.To export a photo what you would do is select it. You can do that in any of these views. Years, Months, Days, All Photos or any kind of Collection or Moment or Album or anything. It doesn't matter where you select the photo. The photo is only in your Photos Library once. These are all just different ways of viewing your photos. So I'm going to do it here from All Photos. Let's say I select this photo here and I'm going to Command Click and select this photo here and then Command Click and select this photo here. Now if I want to get them out of the Photos App what I can do is go to the File Menu and use Export. There are two options here. One is Export and the other is Export Unmodified Originals. So you have to choose one of these two to get the photos out. However which one you choose depends on what you really want to do. If you choose the regular export option what happens then is you're faced with this dialogue. Exporting is going to take the original, apply all the adjustments you've  made, like maybe you've cropped the photo or straightened it. Maybe you've brightened it or changed the exposure of it, or maybe you've touched it up. All the different tools that you can use in Photos to edit your photos. When you use the Export function it is going to apply those to the export. It's going to create a new version of this photo. 
You can choose the Kind, so the file kind here. You can choose the Quality. So of course this depends on what you want. Maybe you if you just want to post something online you want a nice small file so you go with low quality. Maybe if you want to send something to somebody over email you want medium or high. Maybe if you want to archive this photo somewhere or give somebody kind of close it to an original version of this photo so they can have it forever you want to use Maximum. The color profile, unless you're doing professional work, you just want to select Most Compatible. Now size is going to resize the photo. If you want it to be the same size as the original you want to use Full Size. So to get the highest quality you want to choose, Maximum Quality here if you want to use Full Size. If you want to shrink it a bit and save a lot in file size you go to Large. The Medium and Small will make it even smaller. If you're unsure of which one to use you can always just choose one, try it, and then export again using other settings. Continue to play around with it. 
Now you also get to choose information here. Whether the Title, Keywords, and Caption are included and whether the location information is included. You probably want those both checked. But, sometimes when you're sharing something online you may not want to include the information that you've typed in as a Caption in Photos and you may not want to include the GPS coordinates that could identify, say, where you live in the location information in the photo. Now for File Naming you could use the original file name, the one that maybe your camera or your iPhone give to the image and now that's inside the Photos App there. You could also use the Title name instead or just sequential. Like in this case I chose three photos. So number them 1, 2, and 3. If you're looking at an album you could even, say, use the album name and then put a number after it. You can also use a subfolder format. So in this case, since I'm looking at All Photos here, everything is Moments. So Dates. If you choose Moment name it is going to put each of the photos in its own folder named after that collection, that little set of dates. 
Let's turn that On so you can see how it looks. Now I'll choose Export and then I'm just going to Save it here in the Desktop. If I look here now I can see because I chose to have these in folders by the Moment name, it saved each of the three in its own Moment name. If I had two photos that were taken together in the same place at the same time they would be included in one folder. But here each has its own folder and each one of these has its own original file name included in there. So, for instance, this last one is pretty typical of an iPhone photo here. This is the photo name that the iPhone gave it and then it imported into the Photos App with this name and now it is exporting back out with that same name. 
Now if I double-click it by default it should open in Preview if you have something else you may want to open it specifically in Preview instead. I can click on i here to get information. This is where I can see that information that's been included. I click on the Info button here and I go to Exif and this is all the original information that the camera included when the photo was taken of the GPS coordinates. Remember I selected to have those included. 
But I know what you're thinking. Isn't there an easier way to do this than having to go to File Export and set everything. Well there is! You can simply Drag and Drop. So, let's go ahead and make some space here so I can see the Desktop. I'll select a photo, like say this one, and simply drag it there. It will Export it out and you can see I get this version right there. But what settings are used when you do this. If I double click and Open this photo here and look at it in Preview I can see, in Info here, the image size. I can see it's a jpeg image and I can see the file size. But what settings did it use. Like how much compression did it apply. Well, it turns out what it does is it looks at the original photo and it sticks with those. So it is going to stick with the original image size. It's also going to take a look, since this was originally a jpeg image and it's going to Save it as a jpeg image. It is going to use the same compression amount. So maybe maximum, maybe high is usually represented in the code as a percentage. So maybe 90% or 92% or something like that. It's going to use the original settings. It's very similar to if you were to select the photo and then go to export and then go and select jpeg since the original, select the High Quality but not maximum, and then select the size as Full Size. These settings are close but not exactly what you'll get if you Drag and Drop. So if I export this out you could see here, for instance, that this file in Preview is 7.3 MB whereas this one is 7.7 MB. So it looks like the quality was probably somewhere between high and maximum but you could see how the image size is exactly the same. 
Furthermore, dragging it out will retain the edits that you make. So, for instance, if I go back into this photo here, Edit it, and let's say let's just Crop it so it is like this now, then if I Drag and Drop, I can do it right from here, I'm going to get, you can see, the cropping there and any other adjustments and filters and all of that, they'll be maintained. It's just going to try to create a copy that's going to be the exact same size and very close in the quality of the original. You can also see here the GPS information is retained and also all of the camera information is retained in the metadata including the date and time that the photo was taken. For the file this is also preserved as the created data. 
Now another thing that people may mean when they want to get the photos out of the Photos App is they may want to get the original photo out. After all, if we go to Export notice how it is reprocessing the photo. It's creating a new jpeg. In this case maximum quality, full size, all of that. But what if I want the actual photo, the real thing, out of the Photos Library. Is there a way to get it? Some people will show you complex ways to dig into the Photos Library on your own and find that photo. But there is no real good easy way to do that and I don't recommend most users try to dig into their Photos Library like that. That could lead to disaster if you accidentally change something there. Instead you can easily get the original out of the Photos App by just going to File, Export and now choose Unmodified Original. When you do notice that it is not going to give me all these options because it's not recreating the photo. It's actually taking the original exactly as it was and exporting it. I only get to choose a few things here. One is the Naming Sequence, like that. Another is the subfolder format, the same thing here. Whether to export information as a separate XMP file. Again that is kind of for professional use, just leave that unchecked. Now when I Export like this I can export that original photo, in this case this one here, and you could see there it is. This is the original photo here. If I open this up in Preview this is exactly what the camera  sent to the Photos App originally. It's always retained in Photos even if you may get it.
So let's say I go into this photo here and I Edit it. Let's Crop it. Right. Make it like much closer there. Let's go and change some adjustments here. Do some obvious stuff to it. Desaturate it a lot so we can see it different. Let's add a filter. Make it vivid like that. It definitely looks different than the original now. If I were to use File Export and export that out to the Desktop, like this, then I'm going to get that right there. If I then go and do Export and Export Unmodified Original to the Desktop and export that out then I'm going to get a second one. You can see here this is the one with all those changes applied. It's cropped. The color is desaturated. The Filters are applied. This is the one that is the original photo. It was always there and you're just exporting it without all those changes applied. 
Now I know I think what people mean when they say they want to get a photo out of the Photos App is they want to export it so they have a file, but they also want it gone from their Photos Library. Maybe it is a picture they took that they don't want any more but they want to archive it somewhere. Or maybe it is something they took for work, yet all the rest of the photos in their Library are personal photos. All you need to do in that case is Export using one of those two techniques and then Delete it from the Photos App. So here in All Photos you can just select the photo there and then press the Delete key on your keyboard or go to Image, and then at the bottom there's Delete Photo. Then it will delete it. In this case this is in iCloud Photo Library so it is going to delete it in iCloud Photos, which means I'll see the same thing on all my devices. It's gone. Of course it is going to be in a Recently Deleted Folder here. So I can see it here. I can select it. I can Recover or Delete it immediately if I just want to get rid of it now. 
Remember you can do all of this in scale. I can select a photo here and then Shift Click and select a whole range of photos like this and I can Drag and Drop them out. Go to Export. Do a regular export. Export Unmodified Originals. All for that entire group there. You don't have to do it one-by-one. 
So I hope this makes it clearer how to get photos out of the Photos Library on your Mac. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 5 Responses to “How To Get Photos Out Of the Photos App”

Bippie Riley

4 months ago

Hi Gary,

I haven't got a question or comment about this tutorial, I just want to let you know that I have watched, and learned so much about my MacBook and iPhone use from you and your tutorials over the years. I have passed MacMost.com on to others so that they too can learn from you. Thank you for very much.

Bippie
Milton, MA

Dustin

Which External Hard Drives Are Most Compatible And Reliable For Exporting Copies Of Your Photos From A MacBook Pro To An External Hard Drive?

Gary Rosenzweig

Dustin: Just about any external drive you buy today should be fine. As for reliable, I don't do any sort of testing or have a lab for that or anything, so I don't have any information that could help. Online reviews (like at Amazon) can be useful.

John Stephenson

Very helpful information added to your recent video on the organization of photos, especially as I am mostly unfamiliar with moving around the Photos App.

Michael

3 months ago

Thanks, Gary. The Mac file architecture for photos has always confused me, so this was very helpful. I've basically used the methods you decided to get photos out of the photo app for editing in PS or Lightroom. It just seemed like there should have been an easier way to access the files from those programs. C'est la vie. This was very helpful, and it will save me a lot of time searching for photo files in Finder!

How To Get Photos Out Of the Photos App

Comments: 5 Responses to “How To Get Photos Out Of the Photos App”

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