Hi,
First I want to say thanks for creating such a great tool.
My problem/question is as follows:
I have multiple video (mp4) files taken from my Canon video camera which have next to no Exif data in them. The good news is that the file name contains the information on what date and time the file was created e.g 20091225065843.mp4 being created on 25/12/2009 at 06:58:43hrs.
Is there a way to use Exiftool to bulk change the CreateDate and ModifyDate of my video files to include the date and time info from each file name?
Many thanks in advance.
Yes, and actually its quite easy. Exiftool tries to parse dates in a flexible way so the following command will already work:
exiftool "-filemodifydate<filename" "-createdate<filename" FILESorDIRS
If you want to run this command on all mp4 files in the current directory, use -ext MP4 . instead of FILESorDIRS in above command (the . means the current directory).
Hope this helps,
Hayo
Thank you, works a treat.
I am running Catalina 10.15.1 on my Mac Mini. I have a couple thousands mp4 files with filenames with the following format YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS. The files have lost EXIF data after having been edited or moved to a different disk. When the files are imported into Apple Photos, the date shown is the date of the last edit, and not when the video was recorded.
When I tried the command: exiftool '-createdate<filename' .
I got the message "image files updated", but the "date created" remain unchanged for all files.
I also tried the command: exiftool '-alldates<$filename' .
Once again, I got the message "image files updated", but when I imported the files into Apple Photos, the date shown was: 12 July 182118 11:08:30. Not only are the date and time incorrect, but the year is six digits instead of four. When I tried the same earlier today, the year had the correct format but the date was completely wrong. I cannot recall the exact date but believe it was 1 January 1970.
Any guidance would be appreciated.
After further testing, it seems like this is issue with Apple Photos in Catalina. When I tested with Apple Photos in Mojave, the dates and times were correct.
That's very odd. The only thing I can suggest is to confirm all of the metadata date/times are correct using ExifTool:
exiftool -a -G1 -s -time:all FILE
But maybe this is just a Catalina bug as you point out.
- Phil