Although the Photos app for macOS has improved considerably since its introduction several years ago, it still contains some clunky features that you need to be careful of as they might be a pain to fix. The worst of them is: ‘Image > Set date and time’.
When used with care, it’s a way to correct the wrong date and time on a single photo or adjust the offset of a group of photos. Suppose you have a camera configured with the wrong time zone, wrong date or time of day, or all three.
This was a common problem with older cameras, which restarted at an arbitrary time if they ran out of battery. But today, it’s easy to do: just travel a few time zones or accidentally set the date wrong.
You can also read: How to edit photos with your Mac computer.
This lag is revealed in Photos when images from different sources, like a camera and the iPhone, are stitched and interlaced incorrectly. Or they’re just in the wrong place: hours, days, or years away from what you expected.
Setting the date and time allows you to correct this. Select a group of images and videos that are all wrong by the same amount, such as 2 months, 5 hours, and 1 time zone. In the dialog box, enter the first correct date and time; you can also change the time zone. Apple then adjusts all images and videos based on this factor and sets all media to a different time zone if you have one selected.
But what if the wrong information is entered? A reader sent his images some 2,000 years into the future, all 27,000. Apple doesn’t offer the option to undo the operation: there’s no way to click and reverse it.
The best solution is to reverse the offset. The Adjust Date and Time function does not adjust all selected media to a single date and time, but rather adjusts all images by the same degree as the difference between the original time and the adjusted time of the first image.
Imagine you have three photos in a selection taken in 1990 on January 14 at 5:30 p.m., January 15 at 10:30 a.m. and January 20 at 8:01 p.m. Set the adjusted date and time of the first frame to April 20, 1983 at 8:30 p.m., and those frames would now be stamped as 1983 on April 20 at 8:30 p.m., April 21 at 1:30 p.m., and April 26 at 11:01 p.m. just select the same set and enter the original capture time: January 14, 1990, 5:30 p.m.
Here’s how to reset the lag:
- Find the set of images you set to the wrong offset if it’s not the entire library. You can use Smart Albums to identify a set of images outside of the date range you normally manage, for example. (Choose: ‘File > New Smart Album’ and set the criteria for each date range).
- Select all media in the set whose offset you want to reverse: “Edit > Select” all or press “Command-A”. (See note just below.)
- Choose ‘Image > Set date and time’. Note that Photos shows you the first image of the selected set.
- For Adjusted Time, enter the correct time for this frame. (Don’t know the date and time? See below.) Click “Set”. The Photos app will now correct all images.
If after following step 2 above, Photos does not allow you to choose “Set date and time” in step 3 if you have media referenced in the selection. If there are any, you need to fix them or exclude them. Create a new smart album that excludes them or import these referenced images and videos to your library.
If you don’t know the exact time of the image in step 4, do the following:
- Select the image from Photos.
- Select ‘File > Export > Export Unmodified Original’ for 1 photo.
- Click “Export” and navigate to a location to save it.
- Open the image in ‘Preview’.
- Choose ‘Tools > Show Inspector’.
- Click on the ‘info’ tab and click on the ‘EXIF’ button.
- Find the information noted for ‘Original Date Time or similar’ and write it down.
Yes, it’s ironic that you have to open another Apple app to get the information you need.
If the above is too finicky for you, if you find you have too many different sets of offbeat images, or if there’s some worse quirk that you think is some sort of solution, you can also fall back on a backup.
However, if iCloud Photos is enabled, the backup can only work if the iCloud setting in “Photos > Preferences > iCloud” is set to download full-resolution images, as described in “How to back up photos”. .” If iCloud Photos is set to Optimized, there’s no way to undo it.
Original article published in English on our sister site igamesnews USA.