All photo's from my iPhone to my iMac (Cloud) are missing the right information, such as 'date of creation'. How can I get this information back, in order to structure all my images chronologically?
iMac 21.5″ 4K, macOS 11.6
In Finder this info is nog available. I read about it several times, that others encounter the same problem. When I look at pictures on Windows, date, time etc. is always shown correctly. But not in the Finder of iMac.
In 'Photo's' I indeed can see Years, Months, Days etc. But how can I rename all my photo's as I like (chronologically)? It seems impossible to do this in Finder (make a selection - say of one day - rename a batch at once and voila). Hopefully there is a way. Otherwise thousands of images are now just random placed on my computer.
If you used Image Capture to extract images from your iPhone, then the internal EXIF DateTimeOriginal (when the photo was taken) time stamp is used as the Photo creation date that appears in a Finder Get Info panel. If the photo came onto your Mac by any other means, the internal DateTimeOriginal stamp is not used, and the Finder requests the operating system to apply the current date/time stamp for the creation date.
Are you referring to the DateTimeOriginal creation date, or the one assigned by the Finder?
Are you trying to manage this photos in the Finder, or in the Photos app?
There are two kinds of metadata involved when you consider jpeg or other image file.
One is the file data. This is what the Finder shows. This tells you nothing about the contents of the file, just the File itself.
The problem with File metadata is that it can easily change as the file is moved from place to place or exported, e-mailed, uploaded etc.
Photographs have also got both Exif and IPTC metadata. The date and time that your camera snapped the Photograph is recorded in the Exif metadata. Regardless of what the file date says, this is the actual time recorded by the camera.
Photo applications like Photos, CaptureOne, Lightroom, Mylio, Photoshop etc get their date and time from the Exif metadata.
When you export from iPhoto to the Finder new file is created containing your Photo (and its Exif). The File date is - quite accurately - reported as the date of Export.
However, the Photo Date doesn't change.
The problem is that the Finder doesn't work with Exif.
So, your photo has the correct date, and so does the file, but they are different things. To sort on the Photo date you'll need to use a photo app.
There are apps that will edit the file data to match the Exif. This is one:
https://www.publicspace.net/ABetterFinderAttributes/index.html
Where have you looked? Gallery View in the Finder shows this information, and of course any image manager, like Photos, does too.
Creation date is missing - Photo's
