Sometimes the clock on your digital camera is set incorrectly, and when you import the images you’ve taken into iPhoto, they’ll show the wrong date. That’s pretty frustrating, especially if you enjoy viewing your Events sorted by when they were taken!
Luckily, it’s easy to change the date or the time that’s associated with your Events or with each image in iPhoto, so you’ll no longer have to see pictures of you in high school mixed in with last week’s snapshots of your cat. If I personally never had to see my pictures from high school again, I would be a happy camper. Hey, I grew up in the South in the ’80s, so that gigantic hair and blue eyeshadow was IN STYLE.
Ahem. So first, open iPhoto and click on the “Events” subsection from the left-hand list. Of course, you can use this feature on individual photos or groups of photos instead, but for the purposes of this tip, we’re gonna talk about changing the date of an Event.
Go through and find the Event that’s got the wrong date attached to it. Click to select it—it’ll be highlighted in yellow.
From the menus at the top of your screen, choose Photos> Adjust Date and Time.
When you do, you’ll see a new dialog box into which you can put the correct info.
Note, too, that you can click on the “Modify original files” box if you want to overwrite the photos’ EXIF (Exchangeable Image File) data, which is what originally came from the camera you took the picture with. Usually, that’s a good idea.
When you’re ready to save your changes, click “Adjust,” and you’re finished!
Finally, you can then go up to View> Sort Events> By Date to make sure that everything’s in the proper order. If you’ve ever moved your Events around (even accidentally), your sorting would’ve been switched over to “Manual,” which may not be want you want.
I know I very much prefer sorting my Events by date, but I don’t have a million billion photos like some of you crazy people do. In any case, now we won’t have to look at things all out of order. Bye bye, teenaged me.