How Do I See a Photo's Metadata on a Mac?

Open the photo in Preview, press Command-I and open the Exif tab: date taken, camera and, in the GPS tab, the location. What an empty Exif tab means.

Open the photo in Preview, then press Command-I. The Info window opens. The General tab shows the file, and the Exif tab shows the date the shutter fired, the camera, and the exposure. A GPS tab appears when the photo knows where it was.

No Exif tab at all means the photo carries no metadata. That is normal for a Google Takeout export, a screenshot, or anything that has been through a chat app.

Takeout JSON Metadata Fixer restores the date and the location from your export, so the Exif and GPS tabs come back. It runs natively on macOS and is free for your first 500 photos.

The Photos app, Finder and Terminal show it too: how to view photo metadata on a Mac goes through each one.