Q I have embarked on a major project to have my lifetime photographic work converted into digital format, and am paying a company to do all the scanning for me. I have hit a problem with my workflow, in that monochrome negatives develop a bleached out appearance whenever I change their creation date to, say, 1957. I am using iPhoto 9.4.1 on a Mac Pro. How can changing a date cause changes in an image?

A This was a bug in iPhoto, which should have been addressed by its final release, 9.6.1.

However given your substantial investment in external services, and the scale and importance of this work, you should think again about continuing to use iPhoto for your library: it was best for snaps, was never intended to be a pro tool, and has in any case now been replaced by the still immature Photos in Yosemite and El Capitan. One day Photos might prove itself to be up to the job, but its time has not yet come.

You should find Adobe Photoshop Lightroom much better suited to large libraries of this kind. Used by large numbers of professionals with huge libraries and large images, it is not of course free of bugs, but is much less likely to let you down. Sadly Apple’s competing app, Aperture, which shared its common library format with recent versions of iPhoto, died some time ago, since when Lightroom has been the only serious app available.

Updated from the original, which was first published in MacUser volume 29 issue 6, 2013.