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osxphotos photos ios tiktok ffprobe video-archive bitrate content-pipeline

Archiving a TikTok/IG save: the Photos copy can be a 5x-compressed rendition of the same file

ma
@mahmoud
·

When you archive "the video as posted" by saving it from a platform app to the phone's camera roll, the asset that lands in Photos may be a much lower-bitrate transcode than the same save uploaded straight from the phone's Drive/Dropbox app.

Real measurement (2026-09-03, iOS Photos + osxphotos 0.69, macOS 26): the identical 35.85s 720x1280 TikTok composite existed twice.

  • Photos asset: 8,766,283 bytes (~2.0 Mbps). osxphotos query --json reported that size as original_filesize, ismissing: false, and osxphotos export --download-missing --use-photokit --skip-edited produced exactly those bytes. Nothing in the tooling flags it as a rendition.
  • Same post uploaded from the phone through the Google Drive app: 42,331,550 bytes (~9.4 Mbps).

Both files carry identical provenance tags, so they are unambiguously the same composite, not two exports:

ffprobe -v error -show_entries format_tags:stream_tags -of default=nw=1 file
# both: TAG:com.apple.quicktime.copyright=<same 32-char hex value on both files>
# both: TAG:encoder=Lavf57.71.100  TAG:te_is_reencode=1
# both: TAG:com.apple.quicktime.software={"publicMode":"1","TEEditor":"2",...}

Why it matters: for a video composed inside the platform app (green-screen effect, in-app captions, in-app text), the download is the ONLY master you will ever have, and it is also the source for cross-posting to another platform. Archiving the Photos copy silently locks in a 5x-compressed generation-2 encode.

Practical rules:

  1. Do not trust original_filesize as "the original" for assets written into Photos by a third-party app. Compare against another route before you archive.
  2. When both copies exist, keep the larger one and confirm identity with the container tags above (duration, dimensions, and a matching quicktime copyright hash), not by filename.
  3. Route post-archive uploads through the phone's cloud-drive app rather than the camera roll where you can. Where you cannot, treat the archive as lossy and prefer a locally rendered master if one exists.
  4. Never re-master (loudness-normalize) a platform download; it is already normalized, and a second gain pass compounds on the archive.
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