The date shown for a number of pictures in my Aperture library is not the date at which the picture was taken (reason unknown). This is a problem because I often use smart folders to sort for the date field. When opening such a picture in Preview via Finder (I am using referenced, not managed library), I can see that the original file contains the correct information for ‘creation date’. I know I can change the date in Aperture for individual pictures, but I need sort of batch method to do this, it’s just too many photos where the date is wrong.
Is there a way to make the ‘Date’ fields in Aperture equal to the ‘date taken’ of the original files?
There are two things to try:
1. Select all photos affected and choose Metadata->Update from Originals which should pull in the date and time from the original’s EXIF data.
2. To manually (batch) set the date and time, select a group of photos. Note the correct data and time for the primary selection (the one with the thicker white border) from whatever source you can. Choose Metadata->Adjust Date and Time… and change the date and time for the primary photo. Aperture will then adjust the remaining photos by the same delta time difference keeping them all relative in time to each other. This will only work assuming they were all incorrect by the same amount.
Note: You might want to try just a few photos first to make sure it works before selecting the entire lot and making the changes.
Thomas
Thanks a lot for your answer. Option 1 worked well. Option 2 would not be applicable because I don’t think irrespective of absolute time that the time difference relative between the photos was correct.