Change Create and Modified Date to Match the "Date Taken" date

[StephenM]

Hi,
I'm completely new to all this and to be honest don't understand half of it, but hopefully someone could help me out?
I was recently a victim of ransomware and, long story short, i now have all my info and photos back. Unfortunately, all the "Created" and "Modified" dates are now set to the date that the files were decrypted. Luckily the "Date Taken" date has remained unchanged and is still original. The program I use for indexing my photos uses the "modified" date to list the photos and there are no settings to change it so it now looks like I've had a very busy April 2021 with around 20000 photos created/modified in one day . Also, to keep things tidy i would like to have the "Created" date to match the "Date Taken". And just to add another twist to it, my photos are in multiple folders with multiple sub folders (basically, all over the place but all within the same drive) Could anyone advise what my options are to recover from this?
I have the latest version of Exiftool and am running Windows 7.

[Phil Harvey]

Try this:

exiftool "-filemodifydate<createdate" -r DIR

You can also set FileCreateDate in the same command if you want:

exiftool "-filemodifydate<createdate" "-filecreatedate<createdate" -r DIR

There is also DateTimeOriginal that you could use as a source tag instead of CreateDate, but CreateDate is better for MP4 files since they usually don't have a DateTimeOriginal.

- Phil

[StephenM]

Thank you so much Phil,

I used  "exiftool "-filemodifydate<createdate" "-filecreatedate<createdate" -r DIR" and it worked perfectly.

[PPky]

I had a similar problem with my photo file dates and just discovered ExifTool, Phil: you're amazing, thank you so much for making this and supporting everyone using it!
DC