Changing photo date data from date in file name

[obscuritea]

Admittedly, I barely know how to use the command line so I've been struggling here! Using exiftool in terminal on MacOS.

I have a folder of photos in the following format: photo_1@26-09-2019_13-25-38.jpg, in which the first set of numbers is equivalent to the date, and second set of numbers to the time in 24hr format, I believe. So this example would be Sept. 26, 2019, 13:25:38. I am trying to change the FileModifyDate tag (when I list all the tags for the photo I don't see any creation date tags, just this one) to the relevant date, since currently all the photos have the same FileModifyDate- the date they were saved to my computer. I don't need to add the time info to the corrected data, I just need to correct the dates, time can be set to a default 00:00.

I tried the following:

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exiftool '-FileModifyDate<filename' DIR , DIR in this case being the example file I am testing with, but it failed since it thinks the last set of numbers (13-25-38 in my example file above) is the date and knows 13 isn't a valid month. How can I extract the date from the first set of numbers in their DD-MM-YYYY format? I've seen a couple similar posts here on the forum, but I get stuck at how to edit this command to pull the data from my particular filename's format.

Thank you!

[StarGeek]

In order to copy like that, the time values need to be in order from the largest (Year) to the smallest (second).  Additionally, your example shows a leading extraneous number which would interfer with a direct copy from the Filename into the FileModifyDate.

As long as the filename format is exactly as you show, the leading characters up until the @ sign can be stripped away and then the date data can be reorganized with this command
exiftool '-FileModifyDate<${Filename;;s/^.*@//;s/(\d\d)-(\d\d)-(\d{4})(.*)/$3$2$1$4/}' /path/to/files/

But you might also check your files to see if there's an embedded timestamp that might be easier to copy.  Try running this command on one of the files
exiftool -time:all -G1 -a -s photo_1@26-09-2019_13-25-38.jpg

If the images are from a camera and the metadata hasn't been purposefully stripped away, there's a good chance you'll see something like this

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[System]        FileModifyDate                  : 2019:03:30 09:48:02-07:00
[System]        FileAccessDate                  : 2021:08:04 08:19:04-07:00
[System]        FileCreateDate                  : 2019:03:30 09:48:02-07:00
[IFD0]          ModifyDate                      : 2019:03:30 09:48:01
[ExifIFD]       DateTimeOriginal                : 2019:03:30 09:48:01
[ExifIFD]       CreateDate                      : 2019:03:30 09:48:01
[ExifIFD]       SubSecTime                      : 20
[ExifIFD]       SubSecTimeOriginal              : 20
[ExifIFD]       SubSecTimeDigitized             : 20

If that's the case and the listed DateTimeOriginal or CreateDate is correct, you could run this much simpler command
exiftool '-FileModifyDate<DateTimeOriginal' /path/to/files/