Date Taken from DateTimeOriginal

[SteveF48]

I'm trying to correct the field which shows up in Windows as Date Taken.
A lot of my old files have been modified such that date taken now shows a much later date.
This command

Code Select Expand

exiftool "-FileCreateDate<DateTimeOriginal" -r 1999\*.jpg[\code]
Seems to work, but FileCreateDate and Date Taken appear to be unchanged from the original.
See attached files.
Thanks in advance,
Steve

[StarGeek]

What is the date that is supposed to show up?  Both images show up with the "Date Taken" property with the same value as the DateTimeOriginal tag


There is an APP12 PictureInfo DateTimeOriginal tag in the files that shows a 1997:02:18 02:53:50 date.  I haven't seen a tag like that before so I had to look it up (App12 PictureInfo tags).  Is that the timestamp you want to set?

I just have to say, it looks like these images have passed through a lot of different programs.  Digikam tags, ACDSee tags, Windows tags, IMatch, Picasa, iView Media Pro​.  I've never even seen XMP-video tags before, there are only two posts on these forums that mention them.

[StarGeek]

After seeing your StackExchange post where you give more data than you did here, the command you want to use would be
exiftool "-AllDates<PictureInfo:DateTimeOriginal" /path/to/files/

[SteveF48]

Thank you StarGeek, for taking the time to answer my question.
The [App12 DateTimeOriginal is the closest to when the photos were taken on my first digital camera.
Exiftool worked with this code, unfortunately that field isn't populated in every image file.
exiftool "-FileCreateDate<PictureInfo:DateTimeOriginal" -r D:\Photos\1999\*.jpg

I didn't want to mess with all of the dates, just date created.

[StarGeek]

exiftool "-FileCreateDate<PictureInfo:DateTimeOriginal" -r D:\Photos\1999\*.jpg

This is Common Mistake #2c.  As per the docs on the -r (-recurse) option (emphasis mine)
    Recursively process files in subdirectories. Only meaningful if FILE is a directory name.

To recurse this command into subdirectories, you would use the -ext (-extension) option to limit the processing to jpegs.
exiftool "-FileCreateDate<PictureInfo:DateTimeOriginal" -r -ext jpg D:\Photos\1999\

[StarGeek]

Also, the reason I used the AllDates as the target of the copy was because you said you wanted to fill the "Date Taken" property.  Windows reads the EXIF:CreateDate or the EXIF:DateTimeOriginal tags to fill the "Date Taken" property.  See this post for the source tags of each Windows property.

Setting FileCreateDate only fills the "Date Created" property.