I have Windows 10. I have thousands of home movies. They are organized into folders that are named after the date the movies were taken. Over the years, I copied them to other hard drives. (I copied the entire directory structure to keep the folder names intact). I am using Adobe Premiere Elements Organizer, and it shows many of the dates hugely wrong - possibly they are the dates the folders were copied. The DateTimeOriginal exif entry appears to be correct on all of them, but Adobe apparently ignores that entry.
I saw other posts on how to copy the DateTimeOriginal to FileModifyDate and FileCreateDate. I used the following command, but it did not do anything:
ExifTool "-FileCreateDate<DateTimeOriginal" "-FileModifyDate<DateTimeOriginal" 20110520230206.mts
Attached is a screenshot. You can see that, after I executed that command line, I viewed the various date entries and the FileCreateDate and FileModifyDate do not match the DateTimeOriginal.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have hundreds of videos that are showing up in my organizer completely out of order.
The file system time stamps are always in the local time for the computer. 2011:05:20 23:02:06-05:00 is the same time as 2011:05:21 00:02:06-04:00, just in a different time zone.
It would be possible to set those timestamps to 2011:05:20 23:02:06, but the timezone will still be -04:00 and if you show the files on a computer in the -05:00 timezone, then the date will shift to 2011:05:20 22:02:06.
Thank you!! I did not know that. I should have tried the command on a file that had very different dates. I just tried it and I see it worked!
One more question if it's not too much trouble. Is there a command line option for ExifTool to go through all subdirectories and change all mts files? I have hundreds of folders and I'm hoping I don't have to run ExifTool separately in each folder.
Use the -r (-recurse) option (https://exiftool.org/exiftool_pod.html#r-.--recurse) to recurse into subdirectories. Add -ext mts (https://exiftool.org/exiftool_pod.html#ext-EXT---ext-EXT--extension) to process only MTS files while doing so. You can't use a wildcard for the filename while recursing, see Common Mistake #2 (https://exiftool.org/mistakes.html#M2).