Export from Mac Photos app while keeping date created data? I have some photos taken in 2012 and when I export them as originals to a folder they have a creation date of July 2016. Running an EXIF detailer showed the images to have been taken in 2012, so why does Photos export them and add another date to it? 

I tried exporting my whole album from 2009-2016 and noticed some pictures taken in years prior to 2016 to appear in July or other months of this year as well.

I would really appreciate if someone can shed some light on this issue.
Note that, in order for your files to have a created date that matches the EXIF "photo taken" date, you must use Export Unmodified Originals. Modified images may have been edited within Photos which results in a new file being created, and using the normal Export will export that modified file with the later creation date.

There are some options in this post on Photography SE for changing a file's creation date to match EXIF data. You should never attempt to use these on files within the .photoslibrary bundle! Export your files first.

ExifTool is a very powerful command-line application for reading and writing EXIF data in a variety of files, including videos. However, on Macs, it cannot write the file creation date. There's a way around that using a bit of bash scripting.

Here's a command that will work for both photo and video files:

for file in *; do SetFile -d "$(exiftool -p '$CreateDate' -d '%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S' "$file")" "$file"; done


Essentially a loop is run over files in the current directory. exiftool is used to read the EXIF creation date tag, and SetFile is used to write as the file's creation date. The way it is written, it will affect all files in the current directory, so I suggest you move all files that you wanted modified into a directory with nothing else in it, and run the command from that directory.