Mac Finder CREATEDATE vs EXIF CreateDate

[PhilvS]

I recently purchased Exifchanger, which uses Exiftool.  A handy GUI for the MAC.  I have about 80,000 scanned slides and photos whose create dates need to be modified. It does change the EXIF create date, but the MAC Finder shows today's date as the new createdate? Where are they getting the create date? How can I tweak the code to change it?

BTW, I notice that I can change dates in Picasa and they will show up in both Exif and Mac Finder.
Thanks so much.

[Phil Harvey]

ExifTool can not yet access the filesystem creation date of files on Mac OS systems.  You may set this indirectly via FileModifyDate (see the notes in the The Extra tags documentation for details), but the only way to preserve this when writing is with the -overwrite_original_in_place option as mentioned in the application documentation:

       -P (-preserve)
            Preserve the filesystem modification date/time of the original
            file ("FileModifyDate") when writing.  Note that some filesystems
            store a creation date which is not preserved by this option, with
            the exception of Windows systems where Win32API::File::Time is
            available.  For other systems, the -overwrite_original_in_place
            option may be used if necessary to preserve the creation date.

- Phil

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