All 4 photo dates on my MacBook Air Photos app are the same and all wrong for hundreds of photos. And I have hundreds of duplicate photos. How did this happen and how can I identify all the photos with this problem and retrieve the correct dates.?
MacBook Air
How are you looking at these dates? If you want to see the PHOTO metadata, then you probably need to be opening in Preview, and looking in the inspector tool there.
You need to distinguish between the file metadata (information about the file) and the image metadata (information about the image in the file)
If you copy a file the copies creation date will normally be set to the date the file was copied. The image metadata inside the file (which you can view in preview with the inspector window, iptc tab) will show the image capture date.
Summary:
The File metadata is kept in the file system, and represents when that copy of the file is created or modified
The image metadata is kept inside the file, as exif and IPTC data. This won't change when you copy / move the file.
(Depending on your system version, if you export unmodified original from photos, you will usually get a file with the same creation date as the image)
What do you mean by "all 4 dates" What four. A photo only has one date.
What were you doing prior to the arrival of hundreds of photos? Any mass processing of lots of images at once in any way? Any OS updates? Any movement or conversion of libraries?
Where is your library stored?
The dates recorded in metadata - date taken, date modified, date last viewed, date recorded
I have only checked a sample of the photos but they go back many years, before 2009 in some cases. Others have been imported into photos from Photomyne recently. I have suspected for some time that photos have been missing but unable to identify examples. I have done all updates other than the current OS which is not available on my MacBook Air 2014.
I cannot think of anything I could have done that would have changed all of the dates to 9 September 2009. Most of the photos are actually of photos in recent times.
Interestingly when I imported one of the photos from finder that carried the 9 Sept date into Photos, it appeared being a date 16 April 2006.
Wrong photo dates
