File fields lose properties specific to the field type during import

Thanks for your patch miles! Just applied it on my project so that imported image fields preserve title/alt

I have found that this patch does keep the values, but the values are not saved.

The specific problem I'm trying to solve is to keep the image titles or captions that I am importing.

The change also needs to be in _node_export_file_field_import_file(&$file), which overrites the incoming file data if the file already exists.

I ultimately had to do this in node_export.module: _node_export_file_field_import_file(&$file)

// Keep existing file if it exists already at this uri (see also #1023254)
    // Issue #1058750.
    $query = db_select('file_managed', 'f')
        ->fields('f', array('fid'))
        ->condition('uri', $file->uri)
        ->execute()
        ->fetchCol();

    if (!empty($query)) {
      watchdog('node_export', 'kept existing managed file at uri "%uri"', array('%uri' => $file->uri), WATCHDOG_NOTICE);
      $existing_file = file_load(array_shift($query));

      if(!empty($file->title)) {
        $existing_file->title = $file->title;
      }
      else

      $file = $existing_file;
    }