How can I easily change the 'created' date on MANY hundreds of scanned photos?

In photos you can select several photos at once and adjust the date by shifting it by a fixed increment.

From the Image menu > Adjust Date and time.

That would help, if you scanned your photos in chronological order.

You could also try to run a script to change the date and time of several photos to a fixed time, see this user tip.

Photos for Mac: Batch Change the Date and Time to a Fixed Date

Thank you for this script, léonie... I am using Photos 1.0 in OS X 10.10.3

...however, I have followed your instructions exactly and keep getting the following error message:

error "Photos got an error: AppleEvent handler failed." number -10000

When the error occurs the word "date" (last word in the following line) is highlighted, as if this is the cause of the error.

setfirst_dateto (thedateoffirst_image) asdate

Please advise. Thank you.

error "Photos got an error: AppleEvent handler failed." number -10000

That annoying error pops up frequently and seems to be a timeout error.

Scripting is not very robust. I found all the scripts we posted work best when used on small sets of photos at a time and when the photos are selected in the "All Photos" album.

You could also first try to make sure the file format of the photos supports the date change at all. Some scans may not have an EXIF tag for the capture time. Then try first to select all scans and use the Photos command "Image > Adjust date and Time" and shift the date by a second or so.

Then try the script again.

Thank you so much for your reply. The script worked when performed within the "All Photos" album. I do not understand why this useful feature was removed during the switch to Photos but am glad I now have a fix. Thanks again for your script and assistance.

My pleasure 🙂

One of these 3rd party apps might do what you want outside of the library:

Photo Meta Edit

PhotoGPSEditor

I tried the second one PhotoGPSEditor but didn't much succcess when I imported back into Photos. Must have missed something there. Didn't take time to try the tutorinal or read the read me file. It's donation ware.

You can easily do this using terminal. For example, this command (type and press enter)

touch -m -t 200101010000.00 /Users/Genius/Dropbox/Photos/Album/*.jpg

will change all dates to 01/01/2001 12 AM for all files ending in .jpg that are located in the Album folder in my dropbox.

If you need to just change a couple files. you can also drag in all files after the date and press enter. It will go to all files and change their dates.

The touch command will change the file modification date and the access date of a file, but not the file creation date. And also not the embedded EXIF tags with the capture time, when the photo has been taken.

Touch is great to modify the metadata of files, but to change photographic metadata of image files we need a tool that handles EXIF tags.

Thanks for the reply--that's a lot of good information. Touch does change the creation date if you supply a modification date that is before the creation of the file itself (because you can't modify a file before it's created), but, I agree, it surely isn't changing any embedded EXIF tags which I assume photo applications use to sort photos.