New in Photos 9 on macOS 14 Sonoma: Exporting Photos or Videos from Photos is now saving them with the date taken as the creation date

This change is great news for many users that have requested this feature.

The previous versions of Photos for Mac have been saving exported videos and photos with the file creation date of the time of export or download from iCloud, when a new file has been created. This could change the creation date even when exporting the unmodified originals.

And we could not see the date a photo has been taken in the Finder, we had to use a photo browser to show us the capture time of a photo. For videos we could lose the capture date, as they might not have an embedded exif tag with the capture date. Now it is much easier to backup our photos outside the Photos Library by exporting them to folders, as we can sort them by the capture date in the Finder.

When I am now exporting photos or videos from Photos to a folder in the Finder using "File > Export" the exported files will be showing a file creation date identical to the "date taken" showing in Photos, even if we have modified the date taken in Photos to adjust it. This way we can create image files with creation dates several centuries ago, long before digital cameras or even electronic computers have been invented. This is very nice for scans of very old family documents and photos.

Here is screenshot showing an example: I have set the date and time format on my Mac to use the format yyyy-mm-dd and the system language is currently set to German. Look at the column "Erstellungsdatum", it is showing the file creation date. You can see, that a JPEG showing a family document has a file creation date with the year 1791. Only the sidecar files XMP and AAE exported with the photos are showing the date "Heute" (meaning "Today"), all other creation dates are corresponding to the capture time of the photo or video.