Restore Create Date in hiec files

[Romerpt]

Hello Everybody,

Help me with some hints please.
I have downloaded photos from i-cloud in heic format, and all creation dates are set to the download date instead of the original creation date.

When I read all meta info from a photo, the following tags has the right parameter:

-DateTimeOriginal
-CreateDate
-SubSecCreateDate
-SubSecDateTimeOriginal
-SubSecModifyDate

All these values are correct and shows the real creation date and time.

And for some reason macOS finder still reads out the wrong (download) date as creation date. Only three tags contains this wrong value.

FileModifyDate
FileAccessDate
FileInodeChangeDate

These contain the date and time of the download.

And my file explorer reads this date as "Date modified" and "Date Created" too.

I cannot change these lines, an error message is seen "Sorry, FileInodeChangeDate is not writable
Nothing to do."

So, why file explorer reads this and what tags are really responsible for the creation date of the image?
I would like to simply restore the creation dates of all the downloaded images. This info is stored in the file as I see, but read out by the file explorer wrongly.

Thank you, If you have any idea, what I am doing wrong.

MacOS 12.1
exiftool 12.52

Peter

[StarGeek]

As the error indicates, exiftool cannot change the FileInodeChangeDate.  See the Extra Tags page.  I'm not sure what can, as I use Windows and this tag is a Mac/Linux only file system tag.

To change the others, you can copy the data from one of the embedded time stamps.  For example
exiftool '-FileCreateDate<DateTimeOriginal' '-FileModifyDate<DateTimeOriginal' /path/to/files/

[wywh]

Try:

Code Select Expand

exiftool -m -overwrite_original_in_place -wm w '-FileCreateDate<ExifIFD:DateTimeOriginal' '-FileModifyDate<ExifIFD:DateTimeOriginal' .
But notice that FileCreateDate moves only backwards unless you make another command just for it.

- Matti

[Romerpt]

Thank you Matti and StarGeek!

You are genius! 
I have tried both ways, they are working. Only heic files are confused, ordinary jpegs are okay, so it might be a Mac/Iphone mistery, why it reads this data that way. Maybe an error, maybe this is the way apple wants use their cloud only.

So thank you, this method of copying/overwrighting the tags resolves the problem.

Peter