iPhoto: how to show the date of a photo in an album

[maclad]

When I click on "photos" or "last import" in the side menu on my MacBook, the photos are displayed in date order and the dates are displayed. How can I display the date of the photos in a similar manner in the albums?

Note, I don't want to change the date, I just want to display the actual date the photo was taken.

I never liked iPhoto so never used it, but I thought that it was time that I started to try to get to grips with it.

 

[ApfelKuchen]

Are you using iPhoto, or Photos (Photos replaced iPhoto in OS X Yosemite 10.10.3)?

I can't recall exactly how iPhoto handled things. The version of Photos that comes with macOS Catalina 10.15.x has Sidebar items named "Recents" and "Imports" rather than "Last Import," so maybe you are using iPhoto (I don't recall whether that terminology changed immediately with the introduction of Photos, or sometime afterwards).

Anyway, the basic reason that the Photos and Last Import views prominently show dates is that they are, by design, chronological listings. Albums, on the other hand, can be used like traditional photo albums - they can be organized/sequenced in any thematic way you wish, in or out of chronological order. Prominently indicating image date might not be appropriate or necessary.

Now, it happens that in Catalina's version of Photos, the info bar at the top of the album displays the album title, the date range of the images (such as December 2014 - October 2016), and the number of images in the album.

 

[maclad]

Are you using iPhoto, or Photos (Photos replaced iPhoto in OS X Yosemite 10.10.3)?

Anyway, the basic reason that the Photos and Last Import views prominently show dates is that they are, by design, chronological listings. Albums, on the other hand, can be used like traditional photo albums - they can be organized/sequenced in any thematic way you wish, in or out of chronological order. Prominently indicating image date might not be appropriate or necessary.

Thanks, I'm using iPhoto.

I assume that you are saying that I can't display the photo date in an album, it would have be useful in displaying changes with time, in days, for instance in growth of plants.

 

[ApfelKuchen]

Thanks, I'm using iPhoto.

I assume that you are saying that I can't display the photo date in an album, it would have be useful in displaying changes with time, in days, for instance in growth of plants.

For something like that you're free to add titles and captions to illustrate the changes. It's just not done automatically, because most albums are not created to illustrate the growth of plants.

 

[maclad]

For something like that you're free to add titles and captions to illustrate the changes. It's just not done automatically, because most albums are not created to illustrate the growth of plants.

Thanks again.

I actually hadn't realised untill now that I have "Photos" and not "iPhoto" on my ipad, I just assumed it was iPhoto 🙄

I export my photos and arrange them in folders where the date is automatically displayed, displaying the date is useful for people too, because you can see how people change with age, and you can quickly see when, what year etc, that a photo was taken. I don't want to add a caption every time that I add photos to an album. I think that Apple are shortsighted in not having an option to automatically add the date of a photo in an album, especially as the date is displayed in "Memories" so most of the basic software is already there.

 

[ApfelKuchen]

iPhoto is a dead application - it hasn't been updated since the introduction of macOS Yosemite in 2014. It doesn't run at all on newer operating systems. Requests to Apple for iPhoto feature enhancements are not likely to go well.

Write Apple to suggest they add this feature to the Photos app. If you're successful, you'll have to upgrade your OS in order to get that enhanced Photos app. I'm sure you'll have no objections to that.

Speaking as a long-time user of iPhoto and then Photos... I don't want that feature, so if Apple grants your suggestion, it had better be optional. If I do need to know the date of a particular image, I right-click and open the Info pane.

I find aging to be self-evident. Dates aren't as important to me as the photos themselves. Sure, I have plenty of albums that are dated - my child's 10th birthday party, my mother's 80th, and so on. The dates are in the album titles, no need to auto-date every image within. But I also have lots of "anthology" albums in which date has no real function - collected images of a favorite place, or my portfolio of best images. What would a date tell me there? That the best shot I took is now five years old, and I haven't taken anything better since? Timelessness is often as important a characteristic as time.

It would be very easy for Apple to auto-caption images with age. It's not about technology, it's a matter of whether Apple believes there's a significant demand for the feature. Considering how long iPhoto and then its successor, Photos has been around, had there been significant user interest in such a feature, there's a reasonable chance it would exist.