Change files date and time stamp

[nq270]

I  have been through the forum for the past few hours and discovered a common problem to restore file creation date/time stamp, but I have not been able to succeed myself.

I have tried:
exiftool "-FileCreateDate<CreateDate" "-FileModifyDate<CreateDate" DIR
but only to receive a Warning:No writable tags set from DIR.

I have thousands of scanned images from 2005, where the properties shows:

Modified: September 21, 2005
Created: November 12, 2013

And I would like to have the date/time stamp the other way around, so the file is "created" before it is modified, but haven't been able to do so.

Any help is much appreciated,

Thank you

[greybeard]

Does this work?

exiftool "-FileCreateDate<FileModifyDate" "-FileModifyDate<FileCreateDate" DIR

(You are trying to use the CreateDate tag which likely doesn't exist in your scanned images)

[StarGeek]

I'm assuming you're looking at the Properties on a Windows system.  If you're on a Mac/Linux, the answer might differ.

The "No writable tags" warning means that the tag you are trying to copy from doesn't exist.  The Windows properties window General tab displays the system file time stamps under the Created/Modified/Accessed listing.  Those listings map to FileCreateDate, FileModifyDate, and FileAccessDate in exiftool.

To see all time stamps in the file, you can run this command:
exiftool -time:all -G1 -a -s <FileOrDir>

Greybeard's command will swap the two time stamps.

[nq270]

Thank you greybeard and StarGeek for your help.

Running greybeard's exiftool "-FileCreateDate<FileModifyDate" "-FileModifyDate<FileCreateDate" DIR

results in Norton making noise:

Norton reports:
Data Protector blocked a suspicious action by exiftool.exe

followed by this warning:
Warning: Win32::API::SetFileTime returned 5 - c:/bin/1962_001_Film-01.tif

Disable Norton has no effect

Running StarGeek's command:
exiftool -time:all -G1 -a -s <FileOrDir>

results in the following:
======== c:/bin/1962_001_Film-01.tif
[System]        FileModifyDate                  : 2005:09:21 15:46:58+08:00
[System]        FileAccessDate                  : 2019:10:31 09:14:36+08:00
[System]        FileCreateDate                  : 2019:10:31 09:14:36+08:00
[IFD0]          ModifyDate                      : 2005:09:21 15:46:58
[ICC-header]    ProfileDateTime                 : 1999:06:03 00:00:00

But the file remains the same, and nothing has changed.

Any help greatly appreciated,

[StarGeek]

My command was only to let you see what time stamps were available.

As I haven't used Norton in a very long time, I can't advise you on what to do except look for a way to make it have an exception for exiftool.

[greybeard]

A quick Google check shows that Data Protector is a recent addition to the Norton product and that you can configure specific directories and specific file types for the protection.

Have you put the scanned files in a directory called c:/bin? I can imagine that would be a red flag for automated protection.

Maybe try creating (or using) C:/temp and copying just one of your files into that directory as a test :

exiftool "-FileCreateDate<FileModifyDate" "-FileModifyDate<FileCreateDate" c:/temp/1962_001_Film-01.tif

If that fails then have a look in the Norton settings

[nq270]

StarGeek & greybeard,

Tried to change DIR to tmp, but still flags Data Protector.
I did then disable Data Protector and - voila - it works.

Thank you so much for your help