A Mac app that renames photos by the date they were taken

Copy a card onto your Mac and every photo on it can end up stamped with today’s date. Copy the same card twice and you get two different answers. The date you actually want — the moment the shutter fired — is sitting inside each file the whole time, written there by the camera, and most of the obvious tools on macOS never look at it.

Archyv is a Mac app built for exactly this. It reads the capture date the camera wrote inside each file — it bundles ExifTool for that — and renames a whole shoot from it in one pass, with a live preview before anything changes and an undo history after. Below: which of a photo’s three dates is the real one, how to build the naming template, what happens to undated frames, how the preview and undo work — and, at the end, where Finder, Automator and ExifTool in Terminal stop short if you would rather try them first.

The three dates on every photo, and which is the shutter

Every image file on your Mac carries at least three dates, and they routinely disagree:

• Date Created — when this copy of the file came into existence on this disk. Copy a photo, and the copy’s creation date is now.
• Date Modified — when the file’s bytes last changed. An edit, a metadata write, sometimes a sync client touching it.
• Date taken — the capture time your camera recorded inside the file, in its EXIF metadata, as DateTimeOriginal. This is the one that means “when the photo was taken”, and it travels with the file no matter how many times it is copied.

Only the third one is stable. The first two describe the file’s history on a disk; only the capture date describes the photograph. Any renaming scheme built on the first two will drift the first time the files move.

Renaming a whole shoot from its own metadata

Archyv reads the capture date straight from each file’s EXIF — it bundles ExifTool for exactly that — and puts a preview and an undo history around it.

You build the naming convention once, as a template: a pattern of the fields you want the name made of. A pattern like {yyyy}{mm}{dd}-{seq:4} produces 20260731-0001, numbered in order. Put the photographer in front of it — {artist}-{yyyy}-{seq:4} — and you get Rivera-2026-0001.

Two details make the numbering behave the way you would expect. {seq:4} zero-pads to four digits, so files sort correctly in every tool that sorts names as text. And the variables before {seq} decide when the counter restarts: with {artist}-{yyyy}-{seq:4}, each photographer-and-year group is numbered from 1 on its own, so a folder holding two photographers’ work comes out as two clean runs rather than one interleaved one.

Templates are saved and reusable, so the next shoot is a single choice rather than a fresh setup. You apply one from the Metadata Renaming process, and build or edit them on the Filename Templates tab.

What happens when a photo has no date

Real shoots have gaps. A frame from a camera whose clock was never set, a scan with no EXIF at all, a file that has been through a tool that stripped it. A renaming scheme is only as good as its answer to that case, and Archyv makes you choose one up front — the template’s Fallback Mode:

• Skip leaves those files alone and renames the rest. The safest choice when you expect the data to be clean and you want to be told when it is not.
• Use Fallback renames everything, substituting a placeholder (UNKN by default) where the value is missing — so the set stays consistent and the gaps are visible in the names themselves.
• Prompt User stops and asks you to type each missing value during the run. Full control, at the cost of an unattended run.

Deciding this once, in the template, is what stops a stray undated frame from either silently breaking the sequence or quietly acquiring a wrong date.

Preview it, then undo it if you need to

Two safety nets, and they work differently.

Before you run anything, the template editor shows a live preview: example output built from sample metadata, so you can confirm the pattern produces what you meant before it touches a file. Turning on Simulation Mode in General Settings goes further — a full run that changes nothing and writes every proposed rename to the log, so you can read the whole result of a real batch first.

After a run, the renames are recorded in Archyv’s history, so an operation can be undone for a retention period you set. And worth stating plainly, because it is the thing people are actually nervous about: renaming changes only the file’s name. The image data and the metadata inside each file are left exactly as they were.

RAW, HEIC, and video

The capture date is not a JPEG-only idea, and neither is any of the above. Archyv reads 40 formats across 44 extensions — 9 standard image formats, 20 RAW formats from the major camera makers, and 11 video formats — so a folder mixing RAW files, HEIC from a phone, and clips from the same shoot can be renamed in one pass, on the same convention.

One thing to know if you shoot RAW alongside anything else: renaming acts on the names, so a RAW and its processed sibling keep whatever relationship their names give them. If your workflow depends on a RAW and a JPEG sharing a base name, build the template so the shared parts come first and the pair stays together.

Where Finder, Automator and ExifTool stop

If you would rather try the built-in tools first, here is where each one runs out.

Finder has a genuinely good batch rename — select the files, right-click, Rename — but the date it offers is the file’s own, taken from the disk and the clock. It cannot read DateTimeOriginal, so dated names describe when the file arrived, not when the photo was taken. On a card you have just imported those are the same day and the scheme looks like it works, which is why the problem surfaces months later, on an archive copied once too often. Apple Photos does not solve it either: renaming there changes the title in its library, and the files on disk keep their names.

Automator’s Rename Finder Items and Shortcuts inherit the same limitation — their date options are the file’s dates. Shortcuts can read some image metadata, so a determined Shortcut can reach the capture date, but by then you have written a small program with no preview and no undo.

ExifTool in Terminal reads the capture date properly, one command renames a folder by it, and it is free — a genuinely correct answer for a one-off folder if you are comfortable in a terminal. What it lacks is a look before you leap: no preview of the resulting names, no undo if the pattern was subtly wrong, and a command to re-derive every time the convention changes. That gap — the preview, the undo and the saved template — is what Archyv puts around the same metadata.

Next: the Metadata Renaming reference walks through every option in the process, and Filename Templates covers building the pattern — including custom variables that combine several metadata fields with their own fallback chain. Once the names carry the date, sort the files into folders by that same date so the names and the folders agree.