If you take a photo with a digital camera, private individuals usually save this photo in a file according to the industry standard JPEG-FIF (Joint Photographic Experts Group File Interchange Format). In addition to the actual image data, further information about the picture, so-called metadata, are also stored within the image file. This includes information about when the photo was taken. Immediately after recording, this time is almost exactly the same as the creation and modification time of the associated file. This means that you can use any file management program capable of displaying the dates of a file to estimate the age of the photograph you took. When working with a large amount of image files, this feature turns out to be very useful. You can see the date a photo was taken right from the file itself in the Mac’s Finder, without having to open the file to read the metadata.
However, in practice it turns out that this useful property is often lost. The time specifications of a file are often unintentionally damaged when copying it. In addition, software bugs in various applications, mainly
can ensure that the correct date information is deleted and overwritten by the current date. In certain situations and operating system versions, the macOS Finder is also affected by a technical error that can lead to loss of the correct dates.
The small app JPEG Photo File Date can solve this problem. A large number of photo files can be scanned in a very short time and, if desired, the time information of each file can be reset to the correct recording date of the respective photo. Even large amounts of pictures, such as a folder hierarchy with several tens of thousands of photos, can be processed without any problems. The app ensures that the contents of the files are never touched. Only the time fields in the folders are changed. If desired, dry runs are also possible where no changes are made at all, but only an analysis of which time specifications are incorrect and could be fixed.
To use JPEG Photo File Date, you’ll need a computer which has one of the following operating systems installed: