Due to a mistake I changed accidentially all the Windows (!) last modified (and creation) dates of many photos from a certain folder. Is there a way to reset these external dates/times to the (still existing) internal EXIF creation date? In other words: Copy the internal creation date to the external win file date attributes?
How can I achieve this in a bulk operation?
Peter
This will set the file modification date/time. ExifTool can't write the creation date/time.
exiftool "-filemodifydate<datetimeoriginal" DIR
Where DIR is the name of a directory containing the images.
- Phil
Hi,
If you're more familiar with GUI, there you can:
1. select all files in particular folder,
2. In menu "Modify" choose "FileModifyDate as in Exif:DateTimeOriginal.."
-which does the same as Phil suggested.
Anyway, if you have really a lot of files there (say, several hundreds), then Phil's solution might be better/faster.
Bogdan
not working
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Microsoft Windows [6.0.6002]
C:\Users\RAD>exiftool "-filemodifydate<datetimeoriginal" C:\RAD\FotoVideoLog\b\b
009.jpg
Warning: Cannot handle date (00, 00, 12, 01, 5, 2056) in File:FileModifyDate (Va
lueConvInv) - C:/RAD/FotoVideoLog/b/b009.jpg
0 image files updated
1 image files unchanged
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(http://img197.imageshack.us/img197/4610/unti1l.jpg)
The problem is that your dateTimeOriginal is out of range. You can't have a FileModifyDate in 1956 on most filesystems.
- Phil
Thank you for helping in GUI section, Phil.
I'm daily visiting this forum, but have still somehow missed RAD's post.
Greetings,
Bogdan
I'm running into the same problem. The following article suggests that the limitation (at least on a Windows system) has to do with how the hard drive is formatted. FAT and FAT32 only allow dates from 1/1/1980. I'm going to put an old hard drive in my system and format it with NTFS to see if that works (presumably, allowing dates to go back as far as 1752). http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-5034280.html (http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-5034280.html). I'll let you know how it goes.
I think you will encounter a limit of 1970 due to the date/time functions that ExifTool uses.
- Phil
Agreed... thanks for the follow-up. It turns out that I'm already running NTFS. I'll just move the EXIF date(s) to the filename and use that for sorting. Not ideal, but readily portable. Thanks again.