I took a bunch of photos with my digital camera, but the clock on my camera was set incorrectly. I’ve tried to fix this by changing the date and time of these photos in iPhoto, but when I show these files in the Finder, they still have the wrong date and time.

As you’ve discovered, you can adjust the date and time of your photos within iPhoto for your own organizational purposes, but that doesn’t modify the actual creation date and creation time of your original files in the Finder. And if you try to export these photos out of iPhoto, you’ll end up with the current date and time as the exported files’ creation date and time.

Plus, the Finder doesn’t let you modify the creation date and creation time of any files. If you click a file and choose File > Get Info (Command-I), you’ll notice that you’re prevented from making any changes to the Created field there.

You can change a file's creation date--along with other attributes--using the intuitive interface of A Better Finder Attributes.

The solution is to launch the Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities) and type this, but don’t press Return just yet:

touch –t YYYYMMDDhhmm.ss

Replace YYYY with the year, MM with the month, DD with the day, hh with the hour (0 through 24), mm with the minutes, and ss with the seconds of your desired creation date. Before pressing Return, insert a space and then drag-and-drop the file you want to change into the Terminal. Then press Return, and you have just changed the creation date of your desired file.

If you’d like to change the modification date, start your line with touch –mt instead of touch –t.

If you’d rather not use the Terminal, you can download A Better Finder Attributes ($15, www.publicspace.net). This utility gives you a graphical user interface for modifying attributes about your files that the Finder normally won’t let you modify.