I have tons of older MPEG and h264 videos in Photos eating tons of space, and I'd like to batch reencode them all to use HEVC. I've trying individually "editing" (Right Click -> Edit With -> Compressor) the biggest ones with Compressor and saving the reencodes to the same directory where the originals reside, but Photos doesn't seem to detect the new file and just seems to delete it as soon as the encoding job finishes. Is there a simple process for doing this within Photos and Compressor that retains all timestamps and metadata? I don't want to piece together a questionable script with ffmpeg that might miss some metadata I'm not aware of.
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Have you done one, and compared it with the original? What's the goal here?– Marc WilsonCommented Sep 12 at 4:37
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@MarcWilson I've done some manually with Compressor and the quality is great! I just don't understand how to do it from within Photos and preserving all the timestamp and location metadata. The goal is to reencode all the relatively inefficiently encoded h264 (mainly) videos from other devices. My 4K 30FPS clips in h264 from a GoPro, for example, are around ~400MB/minute, which is painfully large compared to HEVC transcodes using less than half the space.– Preston LeeCommented Sep 13 at 17:45
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Your best option will be to edit outside of the Photos app, and reimport. Does ffworks.net or handbrake.fr give you teh appropriate options? If so you should be able to bulk edit the raw files and reimport into Photos.app– StacksCommented Sep 13 at 18:49
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Using ffmpeg at the command line with some esoteric parameters has generally worked to preserve metadata, but I've also had some unpredictable quirks in playback on Apple devices, and would trust Apple's Compressor more to handle their own device compatibility since 99% of my use cases are within the Apple ecosystem.– Preston LeeCommented Sep 16 at 22:47
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