How to View Photo Metadata on Mac: Date Taken, GPS, Camera

How to view photo metadata on a Mac with Preview, Photos, Finder or Terminal. Where the date taken, GPS and camera are shown, and why some photos have none.

1 October 2026

Open the photo in Preview, choose Tools > Show Inspector (Command-I) and click the Exif tab. It shows the date taken, the camera, the lens and the exposure. The GPS tab shows the location on a map. The Photos app and Finder's Get Info show a shorter version.

macOS has no single "metadata" window, but four built-in tools each show a part of it. Which one you use depends on where the photo is.

Preview: the most complete view

Preview shows nearly everything a photo carries.

Open the photo in Preview.
Choose Tools > Show Inspector, or press Command-I.
Click the tabs at the top of the Inspector window:
- General Info (the "i" tab): size, dimensions, colour profile.
- Exif: Date Time Original (the date taken), camera make and model, lens, aperture, shutter speed, ISO.
- GPS: latitude, longitude and altitude, with a small map. This tab only appears when the photo has a location.
- TIFF and IPTC: the software that saved the file, and captions or keywords, when present.

If the Exif tab has no Date Time Original, the photo has no date taken inside it. Every program then falls back to the file date, which is usually the day the photo was copied.

The GPS tab also has a Remove Location Info button. It deletes the location from that file.

Photos app: the quick look

In the Photos app, select a photo and press Command-I, or click the (i) button in the toolbar. The Info window shows the date and time, the camera and lens, the exposure, the file size and, when there is one, the location on a map.

One catch: Photos shows the date of its own library entry. If you changed a date with Image > Adjust Date and Time, Photos shows the new date, but the original file you imported may still hold the old one. To see what is inside the file itself, open it in Preview.

Finder: Get Info

Select the file in Finder and press Command-I. The More Info section shows the dimensions, the camera make and model, and exposure details.

The Created and Modified dates at the top of the window are file dates, not the date taken. They change when the file is copied, downloaded or unzipped. The difference is explained in what does date modified mean.

Terminal: every field

For a full list, Terminal has two options.

mdls is built into macOS and prints what Spotlight read from the file:

mdls -name kMDItemContentCreationDate -name kMDItemLatitude -name kMDItemLongitude photo.jpg

exiftool prints every tag the file holds, with nothing hidden. Install it with Homebrew (brew install exiftool), then:

exiftool -a -G1 -s photo.jpg

To print only the dates of a whole folder:

exiftool -DateTimeOriginal -CreateDate -FileModifyDate .

Why some photos show no date taken

A photo straight from a camera or an iPhone has the date taken inside it. Many other photos do not:

Google Takeout exports. Google keeps the real date and place in a separate .json file next to each photo, so the photo itself often has no date taken and no GPS. See why Google Takeout photos have the wrong date.
Screenshots. No camera took them, so nothing wrote a date: do screenshots have metadata?
Photos from WhatsApp and other chat apps. Most of them strip the metadata when they send a photo.
Scans. The scanner records the day of the scan, not the day of the photo.

For a Takeout export, the app writes the date, time and GPS from each .json file into its photo, on Mac or Windows. After that, Preview's Exif and GPS tabs show the real values, and Apple Photos sorts the photos into the right years. The first 500 photos are free.

To change the date or place of single photos on a Mac, use Photo Metadata EXIF Editor from the Mac App Store: open the Selected Photos tab, pick the photos and use Edit → Set Date & Time or Set Location. Other ways to edit are in the best way to change photo metadata.

FAQ

Can I see the metadata of many photos at once on a Mac?

Not with Preview or Finder; they show one photo at a time. exiftool in Terminal prints a whole folder in one command (see above). To confirm that a batch of fixed photos has the right dates, follow how to check that photo dates are fixed.

How do I remove the location from a photo on a Mac?

For one file, use Remove Location Info on Preview's GPS tab. For photos in the Photos app, choose File > Export and turn off Location Information in the export options; the exported copies then have no location.

Does viewing the metadata change the photo?

No. Preview, Photos, Finder, mdls and exiftool with the commands above only read the file.

Where is the "Date taken" column in Finder?

Finder has no such column. Its list view shows file dates only. Use Preview's Exif tab for one photo, or exiftool for a folder.