How to download photos including captions?

One option is to in iPhone save it from Camera view or Photos to Files ("Save to Files") to a connected exFAT formatted USB drive and copy it from there. Or save it to Files to iCloud Drive and download it via web browser from there. Either way, the Caption is then in image EXIF a.k.a. IFD0 metadata as:

[IFD0]          ImageDescription                : qwerty

And Windows displays that in two places:

I did not test this but I believe yet another option is to let iPhone upload image to iCloud Photos and via a web browser download them from there.

On the other hand, if you download images from iPhone via USB cable to PC or Mac then only originals are imported with no metadata edits.

Richard.Taylor wrote:

I downloaded an edited and commented picture from iCloud.com, and it didn't include captions, titles, or keywords.

The display of Captions on the Mac depends on which iOS/iPadOS is used... iOS 16 inserts Caption to XMP-dc:Description AND IFD0:ImageDescription while iPadOS 26 inserts ONLY to the latter which neither Finder's GetInfo nor Photos.app display. ...I have for a long time wondered why Apple did this change...

exiftool -a -G1 -s -Software -Description -ImageDescription .
======== ./IMG_4022.HEIC
[IFD0]          Software                        : 16.7.12
[XMP-dc]        Description                     : qwerty
[IFD0]          ImageDescription                : qwerty
======== ./IMG_0935.HEIC
[IFD0]          Software                        : 26.1
[IFD0]          ImageDescription                : qwerty

A fix for that is to do a dummy edit with GraphicConverter which with at least my prefs copies IFD0:ImageDescription to XMP-dc:Description (which Finder and Photos.app display) and deletes the former in the process:

exiftool -a -G1 -s -Software -Description -ImageDescription .
======== ./IMG_4022.HEIC
[IFD0]          Software                        : 16.7.12
[XMP-dc]        Description                     : qwerty
======== ./IMG_0935.HEIC
[IFD0]          Software                        : 26.1
[XMP-dc]        Description                     : qwerty

...

p.s. To be more specific my workflow in this quick test was:

Take .heic image with iPhone (or iPad).

Add caption to it in iPhone Photos.

From iPhone Photos "Save to Files" and choose iCloud Drive as the destination (or USB drive).

On the Mac open iCloud Drive and copy the .heic to the Desktop and import it to Photos. Or use a web browser to download from iCloud Drive.

Matti,

I downloaded an edited and commented picture from iCloud.com, and it didn't include captions, titles, or keywords. Its Exif had the original date from when the picture was taken 20 years ago, and it had the today's date for the file creation. A 30 year old picture scanned from a slide more recently had no captions, titles, or keywords, and the only date on it was from today's download.

Actually, I just looked through the Exif metadata (and IPTC) for words I knew were in the Caption, etc. Not there.