What Tag Does Google Photos Read For description

[wywh]

Has Google Photos changed sometime this year as to from where they draw the Description?

At around January 2022 for some strange reason Google Photos moved its old Description info-field lower and labeled it "Other". It seems it is not possible to edit that "Other" field unless the edited .jpg is re-imported.

But as before, Google Photos grabs that text from either 'XMP-dc:Description' or 'IPTC:Caption-Abstract' when importing .jpg. It seems to prefer 'XMP-dc:Description' if they differ but I always make them same anyway.

The old Description info-field is still available in the upper panel but it seems to accept only direct manual input from the keyboard. I have not tested whether that field is exported as .json sidecar via Google Takeout.

There is a long thread people complaining about this in Google Photos support page:

https://support.google.com/photos/thread/143046752?hl=en&msgid=145433598

[jeffdlb]

I think that if you want to add a Description on upload, you will need to use the Google Photos API rather than the UI. Read the desired caption with Exiftool, then feed it into the API POST request (Step 2 of https://developers.google.com/photos/library/guides/upload-media).

I note that a manually-added Google Photos Description does not appear to be preserved after download in any field readable by Exiftool, and re-uploading the downloaded photo creates a new object without Description. Doubtless the description is recorded separately as metadata in the object store rather than in the object itself.