How To Change Photo Time and Location in Mac Photos

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can adjust the time and location of photos in the Photos App on your Mac. 

So when you take a picture with your iPhone or another camera it will add it to the Metadata of the file the time and also the location, if it is available. For instance, your iPhone probably knows your location using its GPS ability but a regular camera may not have that. So there may be no location information. But sometimes this information isn't accurate. For instance you may have changed time zones, but not changed the clock on your camera to reflect that. Here's how you can change the time and also location on any photo. 

So as an example let's use this photo here. If I go into it I can see at the top it's got a date and time and it also has a location here. But let's say I want to change the time because perhaps it is wrong. Perhaps I had the time zone wrong or something. You can go into Image and then here is where you adjust the date and time. Select that and now you have all of these controls here. In most cases what you probably want to do is change the time zone. To do that just search for a location near where you were. So you just type the name of the location. It doesn't have to be the exact location. Just something in the same time zone. So I'll adjust it with this and you can see here just by pressing Tab to accept this field here it adjusts the time, you see by two hours. The original is shown here and the adjusted time is there. If I click Adjust here now you can see the time is changed up here. I can always go back in and see the original time, like that, and change the time zone back to anything else I want, like that. You can also click on the Map to easily jump to a specific time zone. 

Now in addition to that you can simply change the time here and leave the time zone alone. So, if perhaps the clock on your camera wasn't set correctly you can change something here. I'll change this to 9:00 pm here and Adjust and you can see it's changed there. I can go back here. I can always see the original time to go back to it. 

The original time, the actual Metadata of the photo never changes. It's always there. That's because Photos is non-destructive with your original file. Whatever the camera gave to Photos, that Metadata is always going to remain there. So if you had the wrong time as your original time, it will always stay as the original time. You always can know what that original data looked like. But by adjusting it here, in Photos when you search for things by date or you look at a list and sort it by date, it's always going to use the adjusted time. So you can kind of forget that the original time was wrong but the original file doesn't get altered. It's very important Photos will NOT alter the original file. You want to always be able to go back to the original if for some reason you need to. 

Now this also works in Batches. You can select multiple photos, like I'll select these four here, and then I can go to Adjust Date & Time and it will say here at the top it is going to adjust the Date & Time of four selected photos. If you do something like change the time zone or change the time, say, increasing the time here by one hour then it's going to adjust all of the photos by that one hour. It won't set them on this exact time. It's going to move them all the same amount of time. So it is easy to select a group of photos and correct the time in them all at once. 

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Now how about location? You can see the location of all your photos by going to the Map here. It will show you the map and you can zoom in and it will break it into smaller groups and everything like that. It will only show photos here that actually have a GPS location set. However, if you want to adjust the location of a photo because it is wrong you go to that photo. In the Menu there is Location. We'll look at that in a minute. But if you want to set the location manually for something, like change this one, what you would do is click the i button here, the Info button, or just use Window, Info or Command i. It brings up the Info Window with all sorts of metadata shown and a map showing you the location. You can move around on this map and zoom in and zoom out. But to change it what you need to do is Click and Hold the little Pin. You can't just simply drag it. You have to Click and Hold and wait for it to be lifted up. Then move it to a new location, like this, and drop it there. It will drop and now have that adjusted location right there. 

But you can also type. So, for instance, I can type the name of a city or a specific location or even an address. Select it and it will move to that spot. This is really handy when you don't know the exact location. You just want to type the name of the city to at least have it be closer to the actual location. There are tons of locations you can type in addition to a regular address that it will recognize. So notice here I've changed this location but remember the metadata of the original photo is always preserved. That original file is exactly the same way it was when it came off the camera. So if I go to Image here and Location you see I've got Revert To Original Location here and now this photo has reverted to that spot. 

Now what about situations where there is no location. For instance, if I view this photos here you'll see there's no location up here. I took this with a regular camera, something that didn't have GPS, so it doesn't have a GPS location there. If I click the Info Button here or use Command i, I can see there's no location but I can assign a location. To do that you can just type something, like that. Unless you do know the exact location it is okay to have something vague, like this. At least now it will appear on the Map correctly and appear in Searches correctly. But, once you've got a Map going here, like this, you can adjust it. Here I'll go ahead and move this somewhere closer to the actual location, like that. You can Revert this to the original location which in this case is nothing.

There is another way to set the location. Say you took a picture with your iPhone near or maybe exactly the same location as you took a picture with a regular camera. So, for instance, I can go to this photo here, a selfie, and it was taken with my iPhone. It's got a location here. So I go to Image, Location and I can Copy this location. Now I can go to this photo here and I can go to Image, Location and Assign Location. It will assign the same location as from the one that I copied. So that is super handy. If you are taking a whole bunch of photos with a regular camera and you know you're not going to get GPS information, take one picture with your iPhone just to grab that GPS location later and you can assign it to all the photos. You can do just like you did with Time where you can select a range of photos here. You can get Info and you'll see all the Pins here. You can't move the Pins since there are multiple ones. But you can type here to assign a location to all of them. 

So here's some extra tips. If you go to View and then Metadata and turn on Location you'll see this little GPS symbol in the top right corner of any photo that has a location assigned. So I can see very easily which photos have a GPS location and which photos don't. Also I can Click on this and it will go right to the Info Window here. 

If you want to Remove the location from a photo, like this one, you can go to Image, Location and then Hide Location. You can see it no longer shows the location here. But, like I said before, the original is always retained. So you can always go to Image, Location and Revert To Original location and it will show it again. 

Notice by having View, Metadata, Location on I also see the symbol here in this view. I can click on it to get Info. 

When Exporting a photo, like this one, I'll export one photo like that, I have the option to turn off location information. So the exported version will not have the location. Sometimes that's important for uploading to websites so there's a little privacy protection. But if you do export with location note that if you've modified the location like I have with this photo here, if I go to File, Export and then use regular export, like that, include the location information but then I'll also export the unmodified original, like this. Now I've got these two different versions here. If I Open them both up in Preview I can note that if I look at the Info here and look at the GPS information that this one shows me the modified location but this one will show me the original location. Not the modified one because we've asked for the original unmodified photo to be exported. So you are always going to get back the exact file that your camera produced. 

So that's how you adjust the date and time and location of photos in the Photos App. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.