iPhoto / Finder exif data wrong -- now using my wife's MBP

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I'm slowly going through the process of importing my 200+GB of photos from over the past ten years into iPhoto 11. Many of my photos have been stored in folders since my windows days using antiquated import programs such as Ofoto (Kodak) and other Windows programs.

The first thing I noticed when going through my photos is that finder lists the 'created on' for my thousands of photos as all somewhere around december of 2010, and the 'modified on' as all somewhere around december of 2011, which may have been when I finally copied them from a windows drive to a new hfs+ drive. When I open a photo in preview, open inspector and click exif, I can see an older date than 2010

Why is finder showing the wrong 'created' date??

When I import to iPhoto, it picks up the date coded into the exif file, not the one finder is displaying.

This would be fine, except...

For many pictures, this exif data is wrong too. For example, I have a folder of a 50-photo shoot from the same day in 2002. Half the files show up in iPhoto with 2002 dates, and half with 2004 dates. And many of them have time stamps around 11pm when the photos, taken outside, were clearly shot earlier in the day.

Is there anyway to find out what happened with the exif data on these files? I certainly didn't change it myself.

I've transferred this data so many times over the years between hard drives, larger ones, upgrades, etc., there's no telling when or where half the files would have their exif data modified on its own.

Any help is appreciated!! Thanks.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
Mac Mini i5 (2014 High Sierra), iPhone X, Apple Watch, iPad Pro 12.9, AppleTV (4)
Finder is showing the file systems data for the file not the exif data, hence the difference.

As for some of the exif data being corrupted I think your second to last sentence is the route of that issue. Those corruptions can have taken place in one or more of those movements.

There are several free and paid exif editors around for Mac that you can use to bring everything into line.

It may be worth considering an online backup solution to maintain the integrity of your files across software and platform changes
 

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