date photos

You can change the time and date. Scroll down to the bottom of this article:

Add titles, captions, and more to photos using Photos on Mac - Apple Support (LB)

I have so many of these, scanned from slides and old prints. Your pictures are in Photos on your Mac, right? Then you can click on an image and choose Image>Adjust Date and Time. You get a dialog box that gives the Original Date, and then it asks for Adjusted. If I only know the year, I'll put 1/1/1943; if I know the month is July, I'll put 7/1/1943. I set the time to a minute past midnight. Then I know when I look at it that I probably made it up. I may write "Date is approximate" in the caption field.

Many of the pictures have info on the back, and I scan that, as well. I put the information into the caption in the info window, ⌘-I.

Frankly, this date changing is pretty tedious. I gave it up some time ago. What I do now is put the date in the Title. Some pictures I'm working on right now are from 1980. I scanned some of the slides in 2011, and some last year, so the file dates are all over the place. So I give a title like "1980 06 Conn Trip-137-Litchfield⁩." Then when I sort an album by titles they come out in the order I want.

If you are scanning the pictures, it may be easier to do some of this dating and titling before they are imported into Photos.

The scans are not done in Photos, of course. So they start out in a finder folder. I change dates and titles using GraphicConvereter where batch changes are easer before I import them to Photos.

Right now I'm working with pictures that I imported to Photos before I figured out to use GraphicConverter first.

TonyCollinet wrote:

In what way does it not work the same?

If you select a bunch of images and change the date, the date is changed incrementally for all of them. So if I scanned pictures on different dates in 2021, the dates will be for different days in 1980 when they shouldn't be. Also different times, so it begins to seem like the time is real-- I know that 00:01:00 is made up, but 08:12:15 looks like an actual time. I think there were other reasons, as well, but it was a while back...

In what way does it not work the same?

That applies to all images - not just old ones.

I was asking the OP why she says it works differently for old images - in which she was referring to an (single) image from the 30's

Oops. I wondered that, too.