How to change dates of scanned photos on MacBook Air

You can do that inside Photos as Keith described.

My workflow with lots of scanned old images is set dates, GPS, descriptions, keywords outside Photos with GraphicConverter's Browser (or sometimes with exiftool):

With dates I use GraphicConverter > Exif Metadata > Set Exif Date to > User Defined Date... to set the dates in desired time intervals to a batch of images (usually every 10-60 minutes so I can slide more images in between, if necessary).

I then use GraphicConverter > File > Rename [cmd-e] to rename those images with YYYY-MMDD-hhmm-ss.* pattern so they sort correctly in GraphicConverter's Browser and also in Finder lists (I set also not so important file creation & modification dates to match internal EXIF dates with the same command option as well).

Sometimes I then fine-tune sorting in GraphicConverter's Browser or Finder list by manually renaming images such as 1969-0720-2017-00.jpg to 1969-0721-0217-00.jpg and then in the opposite direction copy Filename to EXIF with GraphicConverter > Exif Metadata > Set Exif Date to > Filename... to slide the desired image in between other images so they sort neatly.

Only after that I import images to Photos library and Photos grabs all that internal metadata to its database.

https://www.lemkesoft.de/en/products/graphicconverter

We use the script written by léonie

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

You select a group of pictures, and the script will use the date of the first picture to change the date of the subsequent pictures to that first one incremented by one minute each. You can change the 1 minute increment if you like.

You set the date of the first picture by using Image>Adjust Date and Time:

and the Adjust dialog

But I started by using titles. For instance, my father was in the Marines in WWII, joining in time to be wounded on the USS Pennsylvania at Pearl Harbor. So I had put the pictures in an album and moved them around so that they seemed to be in order. Private was before PFC, then Corporal, etc. Then I added titles like 1941, 1942…1955, 1956, etc. Now I could sort by Title, and they looked pretty good.

I used titles rather than the date metadata, because the dates show in the Thumbnail view, and I could change them very quickly.

Then I did the same for my mother. Then I put them together, and again sorted by title. I saw that some of my guesses didn't make sense looking at both of them together, so I re-arranged them so they made more sense, using the titles to keep them straight. Anyway, I kept adding people who would be with one or the other or both, and kept refining the order until I couldn't get any more precise.

Then I took all the 1941s, for instance, set the date of the first one as 1/1/1941, and then used léonie's script to increment by 1 minute. Then I did the same for the 1942s, etc.

I did this with succession of relatives who might appear together, sorting them individually and then together to get more information. I ended up pretty satisfied with the results.

Richard.Taylor wrote:

I see the value in keeping the metadata with the Originals as well as with the database. Redundancy is always safer. I wonder if I should keep a pdf of a "contact sheet" that includes all the dare [date?] and comment metadata for all my pictures…

For a few years I had a spreadsheet containing all old image and movie metadata I knew. But a few years ago I copied all that info with GC and exiftool to the internal EXIF and movie metadata which then very nicely travels with those files to relatives as YA offsite backup. But beware that "nonsocial" apps like Facebook, WhatsApp etc delete all that internal metadata.

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

The only gotcha is that it will increment the time according to the time change on the scan. Generally this is not a problem, since you don't know what time the image was taken, anyway.

Richard.Taylor wrote:

We use the script written by léonie

Then I put them together, and again sorted by title. I saw that some of my guesses didn't make sense looking at both of them together, so I re-arranged them so they made more sense, using the titles to keep them straight. Anyway, I kept adding people who would be with one or the other or both, and kept refining the order until I couldn't get any more precise.

Then I took all the 1941s, for instance, set the date of the first one as 1/1/1941, and then used léonie's script to increment by 1 minute. Then I did the same for the 1942s, etc.

I did this with succession of relatives who might appear together, sorting them individually and then together to get more information.

Very clever and a very clever léonie script as well.

My approach is different because I prefer to insert all metadata to internal metadata instead Photos database metadata.

So if I want to send the original pixels to a relative, I can export originals while you must export as re-encoded .jpg or other codec maybe with some minimal generation loss which 99.9% folks don't notice anyway. ...yes it is possible to export original pixels with .xmp sidecar metadata and join that to the original pixel export with GC or exiftool but I digress...

Matti Haveri wrote: My approach is different because I prefer to insert all metadata to internal metadata instead Photos database metadata.

When I scanned these pictures, I used GraphicConverter to crop out garbage surroundings, and I may add some comments-- like anything was written on the back, or if a information was included on an album page, and so on. In Photos I edit nearly every picture I want to ever look at, again-- most old pictures can use a little help. The database's creation date is exported in the Exif metadata of the edited picture.

I see the value in keeping the metadata with the Originals as well as with the database. Redundancy is always safer. I wonder if I should keep a pdf of a "contact sheet" that includes all the dare and comment metadata for all my pictures…