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I scanned quite some old (before 1970) film negatives. The scann tools add the date of scanning as exif-meta data to the file.

As a result picture catalog apps sort these pictures according to their stored meta dates (kMDItemContentCreationDate).

In a naive approach I used "touch" or "SetFile" with the "real" date when the original picture was taken (e.g. 01.01.1967)

Both commands create weird results with dates far into future or do nothing.

Any solution to solve my problem?

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Unix timestamps (as used by touch) can go before 1970 (thanks @slingerapp for pointing this out) but this is not relevant here.

exiftool can be installed directly from the ExifTool Website as a standard macOS package, or via Homebrew/MacPorts. It allows to change the EXIF metadata of the picture, including the creation date. EXIF stores the same information in different tags, ideally all of them are updated to the same value.

exiftool -DateTimeOriginal="2023:01:15 12:34:56" -CreateDate="2023:01:15 12:34:56" -MediaCreateDate="2023:01:15 12:34:56" /path/to/image.jpg

PS: You need to do this before loading an image into Photos or similar. If it is already managed by Photos, export/copy it to a temporary folder, delete it in Photos, run exiftool and import it again.

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    As far as I understand from the docs I’ve found (including the tag listing of ExifTool and the EXIF standard), ExifTool’s “CreateDate” is meant to be a synonym for the standard’s “DateTimeDigitized”, so in cases like OP’s, not the same as “DateTimeOriginal”, which is the one that’s supposed to represent the time the original photo was taken. Commented yesterday
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    For the record, Unix timestamps do go before 1970. The unix timestamp is defined as number of seconds since Jan 1st, 1970, but this number also has a negative range, which extends to as low as the year 1901. Commented 12 hours ago
  • @slingeraap Indeed, learned something new today. Commented 11 hours ago
  • @slingeraap However, while Unix time can be negative, APFS time which also starts at January 1, 1970 cannot. Commented 4 hours ago
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Searching the App Store for "EXIF" yields results for several EXIF editors, including one by Björn Goerke called Photo Date Adjustator that seems to be specifically designed to do what you want. I haven't tested it and this is not an endorsement. I do, however, endorse the idea of avoiding the overhead of installing Xcode (more data than macOS itself) and a complicated package manager, if you have no other use for them.

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    Good point with the installation (even though Homebrew isn't actually complicated from a user perspective), found out that Exiftool can be directly installed as a PKG as well. Commented yesterday
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    @nohillside Good point.  Though, against that, Homebrew has shedloads of useful packages, and after you’ve been through the pain once, finding and adding further ones is really quick and easy. Commented yesterday
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    Homebrew doesn't require the full Xcode. Rather it uses the Xcode Command Line Tools which are installed when first needed. But, I do agree that Photo Date Adjustor is the right tool and answers the question. Commented 16 hours ago
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    Xcode is not required to install exiftool- exiftool.org/install.html#MacOS Commented 10 hours ago
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Thank you for all your suggestions.

I checked Photo Date Adjustor ... but my tests were not successful (who knows, maybe my fault)

I checked ExifTool and as soon as I was able to convince MacOS to install the dmg-file (system settings / security - data protection / Allow app troubleshooting start ... my rough translation from my German MacOS version) the given example with "my" date (01.01.1967) worked out fine.

I will fine-tune this command in a script so that I can use it in all my other directories with "old" pictures with different dates.

Thank you for your help!

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