Your going to be shocked I know, but I found a solution, from Microsoft of all places, who knew they made anything useful

If you care you can DL it here
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...B5-1D88-437C-9F54-1FB0D210B5EF&displaylang=en. It adds a contextual menu to Explorer that lets you batch edit Metadata, among other things for your images.
Of course if anyone knows of a Mac app to do the same thing I would rather avoid Windows, and the extra steps if possible.
Hmm it's not perfect it only changes the "Original Date", but not the "Digitized Date", or "Modified Date", but changing the Original date is enough to make iPhoto put them in the right date order so thts better then nothing, I would still like some other options before I edit all 1144 images