Can I set "1990" as contentcreatedate?

[joshinils]

I have some movies, for which I want to set the date tag.
The date tag is the one vlc shows as "Date", or  Nautilus in the Properties menu under Audio/Video under General as "Year".
When i change this Date via ffmpeg or easytag it changes the field which exiftool shows as "Content Create Date".
Trying to set a String of four numbers gives me a warning, and does nothing however:

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➜  folder exiftool -contentcreatedate foo_a_1990.mp4
Content Create Date             : 1990
➜  folder exiftool -contentcreatedate="1990" foo_a_1990.mp4
Warning: Invalid date/time (use YYYY:mm:dd HH:MM:SS[.ss][+/-HH:MM|Z]) in ItemList:ContentCreateDate (PrintConvInv)
Nothing to do.


Can I ignore this warning, and write only the year without a bunch of zeros and colons after it? (I dont know the exact date and time a movie came out, nor do I care).
Putting the option -m anywhere also does nothing.
I do not want to use easytag manually for over 350 movies, nor do I want to use ffmpeg which would need to copy (-codec copy) the whole movie and thus take ages (and unnecessarily use my hard drives).

[joshinils]

Apparently # helps?

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➜  folder exiftool -contentcreatedate#="1990" foo_a_1990.mp4 

Writes any 4 digit year.

[StarGeek]

There is one thing to watch for if you use a Mac and Apple Photos.  Apple Photos is very picky about date/time based tags and you may get wildly inaccurate results in that app with an incomplete time stamp.  I don't know if it happens with ContentCreateDate but it does happen with a couple other tags.

[Jan Steinman]

Another potential "gotcha..." you cannot set the file system date to "1990."

This may not matter to you, but I find it handy to set the file system date to the CreateDate, which exiftool can do for you on Mac or Windows.