Date stamp on photos moved with desktop app

My Cloud Home - Personal Cloud Storage My Cloud Home
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I used the desktop app on my Mac to drag and drop photos to My Cloud Home. Sadly all of the photos on My Cloud show the creation date as the date I copied them over. Now I have no way to sort them by age. Anyone else have this problem? Seems like a major flaw since any other time you copy a photo within a Mac or PC the copied file still keeps the original metadata creation date.

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If one reads the Apple forum, one might come across a revealing answer such as the following post. There is a very good reason why WDC is stopping development of the desktop (macOS) support of personal storage such as the My Cloud Home on the macOS and it is iCloud. Apple is building a pretty good moat around their business and their customers are captive to their ecosystem and there is zero reason for Apple to support third party storage. Apple users could blame the third party device makers all they want but it doesn’t detract from the conclusion that this has been an Apple’s business decision.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252812655

Imgur

However there are free programs such as this to batch fix the creation dates if that is the only metadata recovery needed.

ExifTool

Just for completeness, though, I did look at the documentation, and with ExifTool, do this:

exiftool -r '-DateTimeOriginal>FileModifyDate' directoryname

(Remove the -r if you don’t want recursion, and if you do that, you can also give a list of files or a wildcard instead of directoryname.) And be careful with those quotes — if you’re running this on Windows, you want " instead of '.

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Thanks for the info NoPlex. I’ll play around with the freeware. Such a shame that this should even be a problem. Photos uploaded directly from my iPhone keep the EXIF data but not moved from the Mac.

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I hadn’t done anything with command lines on a Mac but I got the tool figured out. Thanks again for the sample script. It seems to have updated all the files with the exception of .M4V movie files. I’m not sure how or if those can be modified with this tool but I’m happy to get the photos corrected.

1 Like
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For those who are allergic to the command line, there is a front end GUI for the exiftool

jExifToolGUI: A java/Swing Windows/Linux/MacOS graphical frontend

1392Ă—845 187 KB

MacOS:

  • jExifToolGUI-x86_64-macos-2.0.1-with_jre.dmg.zip: A MacOS bundle including java V11.

When I have double-clicked the jExifToolGUI app bundle from the Finder, it closes immediately after the Splash screen. Why ?
jExifToolGUI is from an “unidentified” developer (me) and therefore blocked by the MacOS Gatekeeper software. You need to add jExifToolGUI to the “list of exceptions”. That is actually very simple. See Apple support.

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Hi I have 2 2TB wd home drives. The drives clocks are not syncing to neither time.windows.com nor to mu windows 11 pc’s clock. May all these mishaps are linked.