Captions no longer accompany images when photos transferred from iPhone to IMac

One save way to transfer the photos from the iPhone with the captions applied would be to use iCloud Photos to sync the photos between your iPhone and your Mac.

Would it be possible for you to use iCloud Photos? Then the Photos Library on your Mac would always be identical to the Photos Library on your iPhone and the captions you add on your Mac would sync to the iPhone and vice versa.

Richard, did you make this test with a new photo, that did not yet have a caption?

The results might be different, if the caption has already been embedded in the EXIF tags of the photo. If you have same time to spare, would you mind to take a new photo with the iPhone and assign a new caption in Photos iOS, so the caption is only stored in the Photos Library, but not in the exif tags of the photo, when you air drop it? Is the caption still transferred? I cannot test myself, because my only iPhone and iPad are already running iOS/iPadOS 26.

When I AirDrop a picture from my iPhone to my Mac, running iOS18 and macOS15, I get captions:

The caption appears in the Exif and the IPTC metadata, and it's shown by Preview and by Photos.

Keywords and Titles, which aren't shown in iOS, don't come through, however.

What are you doing that's different?

léonie wrote: …Richard, did you make this test with a new photo, that did not yet have a caption?

The date on it is October 14th. It's from my Nikon, with the caption added in Photos on the Mac, and then synchronized with iCloud. The AirDrop was today.

The results might be different, if the caption has already been embedded in the EXIF tags of the photo. If you have same time to spare, would you mind to take a new photo with the iPhone and assign a new caption in Photos iOS, so the caption is only stored in the Photos Library, but not in the exif tags of the photo, when you air drop it? Is the caption still transferred? I cannot test myself, because my only iPhone and iPad are already running iOS/iPadOS 26.

Picture of my Mac, just now. I added the silly caption, then airdropped it to the Mac. Opened IPTC in GraphicConverter. It's also in Exif. Exif comes with all sorts of stuff! But not keywords or title.

The picture still hasn't made it to the Mac via iCloud after 10 minutes.

jniere wrote: …do you get a pop-up window that lets you select whether the incoming image goes into Photos or goes into the Download folder?

No. I use iCloud to synchronize my phone and Mac Photos, so I don't usually need AirDrop for that. Images I use here for instance, like the Baby Elephant screenshots earlier, I modify for inserting here with GraphicConverter ($40,) so AirDropping to Downloads works well for me.