Exporting 4K Video from Photos on a Mac

During my review of the iPhone 6s Plus, one of the things I needed to do was export the 4K video that I shot on my iPhone 6s Plus.

Since I have the iCloud Photos Library option enabled all of my media is automatically copied to my Photos library on all of my devices, including the 4K videos. Normally, when I export videos or images, I can simply drag the video or photos out of Photos and into a folder where I want to store them.

However, when you do this with a 4K video, the 4K video is not actually exported. There were two things that gave it away. The first was when I uploaded the 4K video to YouTube, it said something along the lines of "The audio and video may not be synchronized". The second thing I noticed is that when I uploaded the 4K video, and it was done processing, it would not display the 4K video. So I began investigating and began exporting the necessary videos again.

After investigating, I realized that in fact none of the videos that are exported are their original size. As an example, when I dragged the 4K video out of Photos and into a folder, the size of the file was 191.2 MB. Similarly, when dragging out a 1080p video, it was 120.8 MB. Contrastingly, any photos that are exported by dragging do come out as originals.

The image below shows what the size should be for the 4K video that was 1 minute and 1 second long. The second image below is for what the 1080p video size should be.

The curious aspect to exports is that the size of the files are no where near the originals, which were all shot in their native resolutions.

In order to export an original video, perform these steps:

• Open Photos.
• Locate the video(s) to export.
• Click on File.
• Click on Export.

• Click on "Export Unmodified Original for videos".

• A dialog will appear to allow you to set specific options.
• Click on "Export".

• A 'Save' dialog will appear and ask you which folder you would like export to.
• Click on "Export Originals".

This process will export the original files from Photos. If they are locally stored, it will be a quick process. If they are not locally available, then they should be downloaded and saved to your specified location. Once exported, you can rename the files.

There is another option for exporting videos.

I thought I would share these steps so that it could save others the hassle of having to figure out why Photos is not exporting their 4K video properly from Photos. As a note, I even tried exporting uing Photos 1.2 in beta 2 of OS X 10.11.1 El Capitan, and this behavior persists. I am hoping that Apple will fix this in a future version of Photos on OS X 10.11 El Capitan.