Metapho 4+

My love for the Apple Photos app has always been limited by the inability to edit Metadata on an iPad. My creaking 10 year old Mac is unable to do this efficiently. To be honest, my biggest frustration when I shoot with different cameras and devices is that the times, dates and time zones don’t always match and so photos taken at the same time all get mixed up and out of order. I had tried other apps that promised to help but nothing did until I came across Metapho. Yes, you do have to pay to a one off amount to be able to edit the metadata but it’s is 100% worth it! It’s a beautiful app, accessible from Apple Photos using an extension. You just select the photo or video that you need to amend, move it to the position in the timeline you want it to occupy and tap amend, and that’s it! It has totally improved my iPad experience and saved me loads of money on upgrading my MacBook. Truly fantastic! Now I can easily get the photos and videos in the right timeline order and let Apple Photos Moments work it’s magic with everything in the right order.

I have a substantial Photos library and after weeks of hassle I’ve finally managed to get it all uploaded into Cloud Photos. I’m now focusing on tidying them up and sorting out the literally tens of thousands without location data, or with the wrong location.

Editing location data on your Mac is one hell of a chore trying to work within an oddly tiny window interface to, so I was looking for an app on iOS that would allow me to make these changes on my iPad - and ideally a whole lot more easily and elegantly.

Which led me to this app. On testing it out I accessed a clump of pictures with wrong location data and after a little bit of fiddling around worked out how to select them and put down a pin on the location they should be in.

The interface / working area is decent (and plenty big enough), I can drop pins precisely using my Apple Pencil and once changes are confirmed they migrate through to your iCloud quickly.

So while this app will not make changing the location data of thousands of pictures a pleasure (no such thing exists that could do that), it does make it a significantly less teeth-grinding chore than doing it on your Mac.

So all good with one minor exception where processing for a reasonable number of pictures can be sometimes very slow, or can fail. Clicking retry usually gets you there in the end though.

I rarely leave reviews, however after pulling my hair out correcting photo dates using my MacBook only for them to revert to today’s date when I share them elsewhere, like a shared album or iCloud even though they have the corrected date in my camera roll. I finally have the tool to permanently correct the date. The beauty being as I’ve already changed the date and time to the correct ones with my Mac, all I need to do to make each photo date and time permanent is use this app and alter the second to one up or down. Now I can create shared albums with photos from donkeys years ago and it’ll say 1998 or 2004 instead of today’s date. My photo OCD dream come true. Well worth a few quid. Wish I’d discovered it earlier. Would have saved a lot of aggravation.