I just noticed that copying a file from a collection doesn't preserve any of the file dates or times. Is there a reason for this, or is it an oversight?
Try checking Preferences / File Operations / Copy Attributes / Preserve the timestamps of copied files.
I knew I should have taken the time to include more information. I have that option checked, and in fact I also added the COPYFILETIMES option to the keyboard macro I use to copy files, just in case. Either works fine most of the time, but neither appears have any affect when copying a file specifically from a collection, which is what I meant to differentiate. Sorry for not being more explicit, but thank you for responding anyway.
It works the same with collections as in normal folders here, testing in Opus 13. (I'm pretty sure Opus 12 was also the same.)
Is there anything unusual about where the real source files are, or the destination?
What's the full command your keyboard macro runs?
I can't find anything unusual about the source files, they're on local hard drive partitions, not networked or anything like that. The full command line in my keyboard macro is nothing complex:
'Copy COPYFILETIMES=yes WHENEXISTS=skip'
But today it's working just fine. So now I have a real mystery, figuring out what I had going on yesterday that was different. Obviously, I'll need to figure that out before I can troubleshoot any further. I'll let you know if and when I do. Sorry for the false alarm, but thanks for your response.
Sometimes another program/component sees the files and does something that bumps the timestamps. For example, if they were .eml email files, there's a longstanding bug in one of Microsoft's shell extensions for that format which causes it to reset timestamps when it just looks at the files to get information about them.