How can I change the date of creation of a picture after importing it from external drive to Photos

You cannot change the date of creation of the image file in Photos, but you can change the date the photo has been taken, shown in Photos:

• Select the photo you imported, then go to the menu "image" and click "Adjust Date and time".
• click the correct timezone strip, if the image has been taken in a different timezone then you are in and select the closest city.
• Then correct the date in the line "Date adjusted"

All photos you have selected together will be adjusted by the same offset of the time. This way you can correct the date of photos, where he clock in the camera has been set incorrectly.

But Photos will never modify the file tags of the imported files in any way. The original files will always remain unchanged. Photos will create a new, additional version of the photo.

Yes, that is how it is supposed to work. The dates will be adjusted by the same offset. This is usefull, if the clock has been set incorrectly for a camera, and the dates of the image files are all wrong by the same amaount of time.

For my scans I like to use an Apple Script to set the photos of all selected photos to the same date, stepped bya small increment between successive images. This used to work well in the earlier versions of Photos, but since macOS 10.15 Catalina the script will only work, when I select the photos in a top level album or in All Photos:

Script: Batch Change the Date and Time to a Fixed Date

Léonie,

thank you so much for your help! When I run your script Batch Change the Date and Time to a Fixed Date in Terminal I receive this result:

zsh: parse error near `)'

What does it mean? The photos are in a top level album, I am running Ventura 13.5.1.