Replace Date Created from only the date portion of File Name

[seb.deltoro]

Hello,

This is my first time using Terminal on my Mac and have already tried multiple strings from other posts with similar intentions, but no success.

My goal is to replace the Date Created of hundreds of MPEG-4 files with only the first eight characters (YYYYMMMDD) of the File Name and ignore the rest, at this point I do not care about capturing time. All files have a dash after the date, followed by the word IMG or in some cases random letters and numbers.

Examples: 20220330-IMG_8017_M.mp4 and 20201214-EFVB4666.mp4

Thank you!

[StarGeek]

This can be a bit complex because most of the embedded time stamps on videos are supposed to be set to UTC and are to be adjusted to local time when displayed. So the time component becomes important. And a time value must be set to something.

Another thing to figure out is which date/time tag you are actually looking at when you say "Date Created". Are you checking with exiftool or something else? Because if it is something else, then "Date Created" is unlikely to be the actual tag name.

Use this command to look at all the date/time tags in a file and see which is the actual one you want to change
exiftool -time:all -G1 -a -s file.mp4

For images, it's common to set the time stamps to 00:00:00, but in a video, that could shift into the previous day when viewed. For example, if I set the date/time to 2024:12:12 00:00:00, because I am in the -08:00 time zone, it will display at 2024:12:11 16:00:00.

My usual advice in this case is to set the time component for noon, 12:00:00. That way it will still show up on the correct date unless you're close to the International Date Line.

Try this command.
exiftool '-Quicktime:CreateDate<${Filename;m/(\d){8}/;$_=$1} 12:00:00' /path/to/files/

If you found out you were looking at a different tag from the output of the first command, you can replace Quicktime:CreateDate with the name of that tag. You can also duplicate the part between quotes if you have multiple tags you want to write, replacing the names as needed.

For example, another possible tag you might be looking at is the file system time stamp. In that case you could use
exiftool '-Quicktime:CreateDate<${Filename;m/(\d){8}/;$_=$1} 12:00:00' '-FileCreateDate<${Filename;m/(\d){8}/;$_=$1} 12:00:00' /path/to/files/

But it is important to verify from the first command that the time stamps you are changing are not already properly set.