Photos nightmare

Have you tried to split the photos according to the camera model with smart albums?

If you have a smart album set up with

"Match all:" and the rules

• "Camera model is ..." -- one of your cameras with an incorrectly set date
• Date added is in the range -- the date you imported the incorrectly dated photos from that camera

Then you can correct the time shift individually for each camera. "Adjust Date and Time is shifting the date and time of the selected images all by the same offset. So you have to separate the photos for each camera in a separate album, to be able to correct the wrong date.

You can use the smart album to export the photos for each camera model to separate folders and reimport them separately for each camera back into Photos.

I would export the photos with "File > Export > Export unmodified original". Do not export an XMP sidecar file, because it will include the wrong the date you assigned. You will want the original date.

Once the photos have been exported, delete them from Photos and empty Recently Deleted, or Photos will not replace the old original when you import the photos again.

To adjust the wrong camera date for the model, select all photos in the smart album, open Image > Adjust Date & Time", then set the date and time for the first photo to the correct time it should be.All other selected photos will have the date and time shifted by the same amount, so it is essential to do it for the photos from each camera individually.

> Some of those cameras have had the wrong date set in their system

> Is there a software/tool I can use to help me organize my photos by their ORIGINAL dates?

Do you mean the original wrong date?? Anyway, I'd export the originals out from Photos (that preserves the original dates, wrong or not). Then I'd use tools like GraphicConverter to filter offending photos to their own folders (label the images accordingly with colors) maybe by camera model, date, scene etc depending in which one the date is correct or wrong. And set the filenames to reflect the date and time to see them better (YYYY-MMDD-hhmm-ss format, for example). Then decide what the correct date(s) might be and use GraphicConverter to set the date/time. Then check the overall situation in "flat" view and see if all those color-labeled photos sort correctly and fine-tune the dates, if necessary. ...yes that is a lot of manual work...

First - if your macbook is dying, BACKUP YOUR PHOTOS.

As Matti said, the best way to do this is to export all the photos as originals, so you have your original (unedited, and not messed with) files. Store them on an external drive of some sort)

Next, what do you mean by original date. If the camera had the wrong date set when the photo was taken, then there will be no record in the exif data of the correct date. Depending on how the files were copied of the camera, there might be a file creation date from the day it was copied.

So what date do you want to use for the photo? If you want to manually group (eg from roughly the same time) photos together into an album, you can then select them all, and set a single date for all of them in one step.

If when the images were imported, they had the date as part of the filename, then I think there is a script that can put that into the files exif data, so photos can see it.