You've probably seen the movie "When Harry Met Sally" and all you need to know is this post title is a weak attempt at title plagiarism.
Back in iOS 14, fall 2020, Apple added the Captions feature to Photos. Similar to adding keywords to Photos on MacOS, Captions are text added to metadata. The Search feature in Photos will find images marked with these words. Captions on photos are also reported when using Spotlight Search at the Home Screen view on iPad and iPhone.
My summer print project, Camellia Tiles, had me dig deeper into iOS Captions and MacOS Descriptions.
The original photos were taken in 2022 at the Camellia Festival competition, where each bloom had a tag with cultivar name and the competitor. After taking each (almost) photo, I paused to add the cultivar as photo caption. If you remember, captions also appear as text when posting a photo to a Shared Photo Album.
The flower photos were processed in Pixelmator photo and TangledFX which meant there were multiple images taking up lots of iCloud storage. Pixelmator app was chosen to isolate each bloom, while making a collection (each flower on one layer) by color: pink, white, red, variegated. Each layer exported and renamed by collection. Now both the filename and caption have been lost! The stylizing in Tangled FX could have modified the original exported Pixelmator photo, but that is not my workflow, save another new image. Now the Caption has the Tangled FX recipe and not the original cultivar. Sometime in Fall 2022 all these images were moved from iCloud Photos to an archive on an external drive.
Easy to find the folder of images and select three for the printing as 8" x 8" tiles. But what were the cultivars? When offloading the photos, did the metadata retain the captions? Yes, but ... can the stylized image be matched to the original to recover the cultivar name? Yes. But future workflow might speed up this recovery process!
In any Finder window on your Mac include a Search option, and you can type text to locate file by name, date, tag and ... Description (aka iOS "Caption"). Interesting to view Get Info for image files and see the metadata and Description (also "Instructions" repeats the Tangled FX recipes).
For one image the cultivar name was MIA. Have you used Google Image Search to do a reverse lookup? Try it at https://lens.google.com
Last word here: keep track of captions when app stacking and stylizing images.
