Batch write on attribute to another?

[KayGundhardt]

Dear RhetTbull,

first of all: THANK you for the this little but REALLY GENIUS piece of software!!!

:)))

I recovered thousands of photos which - after recovery - were set with new fscreationdate / kMDItemFSCreationDate to the date they were recovered. So their original date when they were shot was lost! :(

Happily I could find with your tool the original contentcreationdate / kMDItemContentCreationDate. Now my question is: is there any way to batch write the one attribute to the other?

I am really a noob in writing batch codes but maybe there could be a way to write out one value to a variable and write it back then to another?

It would take me weeks to check each file and write the date manually .... :o

Any help would be really appreciated!

[RhetTbull]

Hi @KayGundhardt I believe this script will do what you want:

#!/bin/sh

# Change the kMDItemFSCreationDate to kMDItemContentCreationDate for files using osxmetadata
# See: https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxmetadata/discussions/96

for arg in $@; do
	new_date=$(osxmetadata --get kMDItemContentCreationDate $arg| cut -d"=" -f2  | tr -d ' ')
   	echo "Setting kMDItemFSCreationDate for $arg to $new_date"
	osxmetadata --set kMDItemFSCreationDate $new_date $arg 
done

Save it to a file "change_date.sh" (or extract from attached zip) then in terminal do this:

chmod u+x change_date.sh
./change_date.sh file.jpg

You can pass a wildcard:

./change_date.sh *.jpg

However, depending on what you really are trying to do, exiftool might be a better option.

For example, this command changes the file system date to match the data the image was created from the image's metadata:

exiftool "-DateTimeOriginal>FileModifyDate" -overwrite_original_in_place file.jpg

I recommend you test either one of these on a couple of files before modifying all your files!

change_date.zip

[RhetTbull]

@KayGundhardt I realized that this solution won't actually work because it seems that kMDItemFSCreationDate cannot be set. osxmetadata appears to do it without error but the value doesn't get changed. There is a utility shipped with Apple developer tools called SetFile that can do this but I'm not aware of anything else that can change the actual creation date.

Also, I realized after I posted my answer that osxmetadat already includes a --mirror option that causes one attribute to mirror another so in your case, you could use:

osxmetadata --mirror kMDItemFSCreationDate kMDItemContentCreationDate file.jpg

Except that as noted above this won't actually change kMDItemFSCreationDate.

Here's a modified script that uses touch to set the time modified of the file to match the content creation date which may be good enough for your purposes. What exactly are you trying to accomplish?

#!/bin/sh

# Change the kMDItemFSCreationDate to kMDItemContentCreationDate for files using osxmetadata
# See: https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxmetadata/discussions/96

for arg in $@; do
	new_date=$(osxmetadata --get kMDItemContentCreationDate $arg| cut -d"=" -f2  | tr -d ' ')
	touch_date=$(echo $new_date | awk -F'[:T.-]' '{ print $1$2$3$4$5"."$6 }')
   	echo "Setting creation date for $arg to $new_date via touch -t $touch_date"
	touch -t $touch_date $arg
done

change_date.zip

[KayGundhardt]

Hi!

W♥️W!

Thank you for the extra fast reply and super detailed answer! Actually it worked now with both: your (second) script and exiftools.

Again: thXXXXXX-with-an-extra-X :)

My purpose: I am regularly trying to keep all my photos (over 20 years) in order and already tried a bunch of different apps to do so (iPhoto, Photos, Lightroom (now Classic), and many more).

Doing this I sadly hat to make the experience that no app at all will ever stay as it was over such a long period of time. I mean they change library structure massively or get more and more „cloudy“ or even both.

To make a really loooooong story short: I decided to focus on simple file system structure using its directories via built in Finder app and - here it comes - mostly in column view. Now in this view finder does not show EXIF data and only FS creation date…

So when I am sorting hundreds of pics, actually reviewing 2022 now, I need to orientate myself to FS creation date.

Now as I recovered files from a crashed cams SD-card the FS creation date was set to recovery date, but - as described earlier - Content Creation date remained original…

Hope this explains a bit what I was trying to accomplish… :)

Kay

[RhetTbull]

Great! Glad you got the problem fixed.