Apple Tip: View EXIF Digital Photo Data in OS X Finder

If you take digital photo you might think you have to have some type of utility or application to view the EXIF Data of the photos on your Mac. However, there is a way to view the basic EXIF data in the OS X Finder.

Apple – Pro – Tips – You’re Two Clicks from a Photo’s EXIF Data: Just click on the photo’s icon, then press Command-i to bring up the info dialog. When it appears, click on the right-facing triangle beside the words “More info” and the basic EXIF data will appear.

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calvin

15 years ago

you can also use the venerable graphic converter to view all the exif data. It has come preinstalled on some macs. Otherwise it’s available here: http://www.lemkesoft.com/download.html

Trevor

15 years ago

All I really need is “date picture taken”. Where is that?

Earl

15 years ago

Trevor: The creation date (date picture taken) is not displayed in the OS X Finder. I would suggest that you can download “MacMetaShow,” a FREE Mac OS X droplet application, at the link below that will allow you to drop any image file on it to display all EXIF data.

http://xray.bmc.uu.se/markh/photos/macmetashow.html

Tim

15 years ago

Thanks for the tip. Do you know of a way to get finder to add more metadata to view?

@chrisco

14 years ago

I second Tim: Do you know of a way to get finder to add more metadata to view?

Liberty Miller

13 years ago

NOT TRUE (apparently?) FOR MAC OS 10.3 (must be an enhancement for 10.4 Tiger ? What that 2007?) … any similar option for mac os 10.3 ? (( … I can’t part with my iMac G4 !! therefore, 10.3.9 forever! ..)

Anna Ayling

13 years ago

Do you know how to add keywords so that it changed the exif? I’ve added keywords in iPhoto but can’t see them in the exif info. Any ideas?

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Earl

13 years ago

Reply to Anna Ayling

Hi Anna, I don’t believe there is a way to change exif data directly using OS X but their are many applications and utilities that will allow you to change some or all of the data. There’s too many choices to list here but I’d suggest doing a Google search on “OS X exif editors” for a number of options. Good luck in finding what you’re looking for.

Sam

13 years ago

Is there really no way to add the Date Picture Taken date as a column to the Finder so that I can sort and browse photos by the date taken? If not, is there a Mac utility that will allow me to browse collections of photos by date taken (besides iPhoto, which I detest).

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Earl

13 years ago

Reply to Sam

Hi Sam, I don’t think so. This feature is very limited and built into the Apple Finder. Only Apple has access to modify. On the upper end, have you looked at Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Bridge or Apple Aperture? They all give much greater methods of managing photos.

steve

12 years ago

Reply to Earl

Hi.

Actually you can display date/time the photo was taken. If you copy the image from your camera, the date/time is kept as the file modification date/time. If you edit the image in some way, likely the modification date/time will change to reflect when you made the changes.

The way out of this is to use a tool like jhead to reset the modification date/time based on the EXIF data inside the photo.

http://www.hutsby.net/2011/10/osx-command-line-image-editing.html

“After these, you’ll find the date/time stamp of your files is wrong, so use jhead to put them back. First get it from http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/jhead/

then the command would be

~/Downloads/jhead/jhead -ft *.jpg
~/Downloads/jhead/jhead -ft *.JPG

you’ll note that its case sensitive.”

Max

12 years ago

Reply to steve

Great tip, thanks Steve

Lewis

13 years ago

Hey guys, you can install VMWare fusion or Mac Parallels and then install windows on your mac. Then you can open up your pictures using windows explorer. LOL While this does work, it’s kind of a joke. One of the only things I like better about windows than the mac