Here’s How to Edit Photo Metadata on Mac (Easy)
What is image metadata
All digital cameras capture photos in the form of data, but they also record a lot of additional data about this data. This data about the pictures is called metadata. Depending on the camera, it can be anywhere from a dozen up to 5,000 pieces of information. It includes camera details (such as make, model, focal length, exposure etc.), photo details (date, location, format etc.), and other information (copyright, usage terms etc.) Much of this is automatically stamped by the camera, while some (e.g. description, keywords etc.) can be added by the photographer. We won’t go into the formats and standards for metadata, but you can read about it here or search on the Internet for “IPTC and EXIF metadata” to learn more.
How is metadata useful?
Metadata is extremely useful when you need to search through and organize a large number of photos. Programs such as Photos rely on metadata to display photos by year, or in helping you find photos taken at a certain place.
Metadata fields are defined for every conceivable bit of information anyone might want to capture about a photograph, but those most useful to regular folks are: Date & Time Taken, Title (Filename and format), Location, Description and Keywords.
Why would I edit metadata?
Photos taken with your iPhone or other digital cameras already have a lot of metadata. However, there are many reasons why you might want to add or amend some details, for instance:
1) To add a caption or title describing the photo (or a batch of photos), e.g. “Terri’s first birthday party”, for aiding subsequent organization and search.
2) To change the default file name, which might be IMG_0140.jpg or worse, to something more meaningful, e.g. “Terri’s First BD001.jpg.”
3) If location services on your iPhone were disabled when you took the photo, but you now want to add location information.
4) When you have 35,000 photos in your digital library, you probably should add descriptive keywords to help find a specific picture when needed.
5) If the date and time setting on your camera was wrong, e.g. you took lots of photos on your New Zealand vacation, but back in U.K., the time stamps on all photos were 11 hours behind.
6) You scanned a bunch of 1993 “Baby’s first year” photos, but the metadata “Date Taken” field for all of them shows the 2018 scanning date.
How to view & edit metadata?
Like other digital cameras, iPhone and iPad cameras also record metadata. You can see some of it with the iOS and macOS versions of Apple Photos. You can also edit the most important bits of IPTC metadata. If you have taken photos with your DSLR or other digital cameras and imported them into Photos, some of their metadata can also be edited.
There are a few different ways to view and edit metadata on your Mac. Do it with Photos app, NOT Preview or Finder. How/why explained below:
Photos app: Open Photos app on Mac. Right click the thumbnail of any photo (or, if the photo is open, right click it)and select Get Info.
A window opens, showing the file name and format (e.g. IMG_2271.jpg), camera data, and profile photos of people that Photos recognizes.
You can edit title, description, keywords and location (Not date). Photos saves these in the metadata or separately in its database. Type any of these details in Photos’ search bar to easily find the photo afterwards.
Once you have added metadata with Photos app, you can export the photo with or without added metadata. To export with your edits, click File > Export, and in the message box that opens, check the desired boxes in Info section. To export without edits, uncheck the said boxes, then export.
Preview: To view more detailed metadata of a photo on your Mac or in a cloud service such as Dropbox, Google Photos etc., open it in Preview.
Now click Tools > Show Inspector in the top toolbar (or the “i” button). This opens a window containing four tabs. The first tab has summary information. Clicking the second (i) tab reveals more tabs: General, IPTC, EXIF, JFIF and TIFF. Click these to see all the metadata. With Preview app, you can add or edit keywords, but not the title, description or location details. However, as a metadata viewer it is quite good.
Finder: If you export a picture from Photos to desktop with drag-and-drop or File > Export Unmodified, then view its metadata in Finder by right-clicking and selecting Get Info, you’ll see the actual Date Created and Date Modified. But if you do ‘File > Export 1 Photo’, it’ll show both Date Created and Date Modified as ‘Today’, not the EXIF/IPTC date. Mercifully, other metadata and edits, i.e. file name, title, description and keywords are displayed correctly.
Advanced metadata editing
For advanced users, Lightroom, Photo Mechanic, and Adobe Bridge offer extensive metadata management capabilities.
For lay users, SnipTag for Mac is a good, inexpensive option for managing filenames, dates, locations, description, caption, keywords and 20 other IPTC metadata tags, using keyboard or voice dictation.
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Metadata in scanned photos:
- Photos scanned with a scanner will obviously not have any camera data, GPS coordinates etc. If scanning with a digital camera or an iPhone app, the GPS data will be of the place where you scanned — not where you took the photo. And in all scanned photos, date created will be the date you scanned — not when you took the photos (On iPhone and iPad, Pic Scanner Gold app does let you edit metadata date taken, description and location.)
- Photos for Mac isn’t ideal for batch-editing ‘Date Taken’ on scanned photos. This is because Photos takes the first photo in the batch, compares the date and time in the metadata (which is the scanning date) with the date and time that you input manually, and it applies the same offset to all other photos in the batch. This is fine for Case 5 (New Zealand trip) above, but not for Case 6 (baby’s first year). For the latter case, you’ll either need to amend the dates one photo at a time, or use another app.
- Photos for Mac lets you add keywords to a batch of photos. Select multiple photos (Command + click) > right click > Get Info > type in your keywords. These can be the names of people in the photos, place, year, or anything else that applies to all those photos.
Good reads for Mac, iPhone and iPad Users:
Inside and Out of Apple’s Photos for Mac
Take a peek at the innards of Mac Photos. See where your photos are actually stored. And what’s in the databases that power everything you do in Photos.
JOGGLE: The new, Mildly Cerebral Word Game for iOS and Android
Done today’s #Wordle? Want something more cerebral than #Wordscapes? Try #Joggle, a free new one-minute word game.
