Scanned photos, a camera clock that was never set, or images that imported with today’s date all leave you with the wrong capture date. The catch is that some tools re-encode the image or wipe other fields when they touch the date. You want to correct the date and leave the pixels and the rest of the metadata exactly as they were.
Do it in Parergon
- 01
Open your photos in Parergon
Drag in a single photo or a whole folder. Parergon reads the existing EXIF, IPTC and XMP so you can see the current dates before changing anything.
- 02
Set or shift the date
Set an exact capture date (DateTimeOriginal, CreateDate and friends), or shift a whole selection by a fixed amount. Date Operations also offers one-click scenarios such as Fix a wrong camera clock and Make all dates match, with the manual controls right below.
- 03
Write the change
Review the selected date fields and standards before writing. Parergon limits batch date changes to the metadata standards you select.
Check the standards selected in the date operation before applying it; Parergon keeps unticked standards out of that batch write.
Why this happens
A photo carries several dates, not one. EXIF DateTimeOriginal records when the shutter fired, CreateDate when the image was digitized and ModifyDate when the file was last changed. XMP and IPTC hold their own copies, and the file system adds a created and a modified date of its own. Apps disagree about which one to show, which is why the same photo can sort differently in Photos, Lightroom and the Finder.
Dates go wrong in a few predictable ways: a camera clock that was never set, or still runs on last season’s time; scans, whose capture date is the day they went through the scanner; and files passed through messaging apps or some cloud services, which strip EXIF and leave only the file date behind.
Fixing it properly means writing the right value into every date field that should hold it, in every standard that carries it, without re-encoding the image.
Video walkthrough · 3:05 · English captions
Correct Photo Capture Dates in a Batch
Follow a one-hour camera-clock correction: preview twelve EXIF date changes across four photos, apply them and inspect the saved dates.
Scheduled for 07 October at 17:00 Amsterdam time.
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Other ways to do it on a Mac
- Apple Photos
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Select the photos and choose Image ▸ Adjust Date and Time. Photos changes the date in its library; the original files keep their old dates, and only copies you export carry the new one.
- ExifTool (free, Terminal)
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Set DateTimeOriginal, CreateDate and ModifyDate at once, or shift them all by an hour across a folder. ExifTool keeps a copy of each original with _original added to its name unless you add -overwrite_original.
exiftool -AllDates="2024:06:01 14:30:00" photo.jpg exiftool "-AllDates+=0:0:0 1:0:0" folder/ - The Finder
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Get Info shows file dates only. Changing those, for example with the touch command, does not change the capture date other apps read from the photo.
Questions
Does changing the date reduce the photo’s quality?
No. Dates are metadata. Parergon writes them through ExifTool without re-encoding the image, so the pixels stay exactly as they were.
Can I change the date on hundreds of photos at once?
Yes. Set one exact date for a selection, or shift every file by the same amount so the gaps between shots are kept. Batch date correction is part of Parergon Pro; the free tier reads every date and allows 5 edits a day.
Can I fix the date on videos too?
Yes. Parergon edits the QuickTime date fields in MOV and MP4 files, and time shifts can cover photos and videos in the same operation.
See the complete workflow: Fix broken photo and scan dates →
Go deeper: Read the complete guide to photo date management.