exiftool VS photos_time_warp

If you're doing a pipelined bulk processing pass to add metadata tags after extracting them via Speech to text, or have delimited notes in a text file, or ... etc.

You might find ExifTool useful.

It's pure commandline (with a few third party GUI's IIRC) multiplatform and purpose built to display, edit, add media tags to all sorts of AV files.

https://exiftool.org/

> Any method that I've found to clean them up (exporting the originals, deleting them from the library, and then re-importing the JPEGs only seems easiest) will lose all of the years of metadata that I've built up in the library.

The open source tool osxphotos (https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos) can help with this. You can export the JPEG images while preserving metadata using the thrid-party exiftool utility:

`osxphotos export /path/to/export --has-raw --skip-raw --exiftool`

This exports all images that have a raw pair but skips the raw component then uses exiftool (https://exiftool.org/) to write the metadata (keywords, etc.) to the exported JPEG files. You can then re-import these into photos either by dragging them or by running `osxphotos import /path/to/export/*`

Both the export and import commands have many other options for controlling export directory, etc. `osxphotos help export` or `osxphotos docs` to open docs in browser. (Disclaimer: I'm the author of osxphotos)

Check out exiftool.org

Locationator also comes with an optional CLI that can be used to perform reverse geocoding on images from the command line or perform the reverse geocoding and then write the location data to the file's XMP metadata using exiftool. It also comes with two services for doing the same from the Finder or other apps using the Services menu.

Edit: Nevermind, I got it. I used PyExifTool and installed exiftool from exiftool.org.

May not work as not all camera store the serial number in the EXIF, but if you've got exiftool installed you can try running:

I think TIFF has some unique features that makes it more prone to certain security issues[1] compared to other formats, such as storing absolute file offsets instead of relative offsets. So I am not sure TIFF is a good container format, but many camera raws are TIFF-based for some reason.[2]

[1] https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=libtiff

[2] https://exiftool.org/#supported (search for "TIFF-based")

I have struggled with this in the past, and I found the utility called exiftool quite useful.

I think the most likely thing that has happened in your case is that the data in the Photos.sqlite database file has been corrupted somehow--likely some kind of bug in Photos.app. So when Photos reports the date on a photo, it's retrieving that date from the database, not from the actual image file on disk. Thus, it's possible the date/time of the photos themselves is still preserved in the EXIF data of the original images. The Photos Time Warp tool has an option to read the date/time from the EXIF data and reset it in the Photos database to match. This tool requires a level of comfort with the command line so I wouldn't use it if you're not comfortable running commands in the Terminal but it is one option (the only one I know of) that might be able to restore the correct date/time for your affected photos by reading the data from the EXIF data of the original images.