File Created Date for old photos in the 1800s

Help & Support
1

I have organized a photo collection that includes very old scanned photos.
After I have edited a photo's 'Date Taken', I change the file Date Created to match the Date Taken:
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I do that because many of my clients use Macs, but Finder in Mac has no column to display the date a photo was taken, but does have a column for Date Created.
That is a common practice for those who work with dates of scanned photos.

However, for photos with an early Date Taken, the Date Created field does not display the correct date after the Date Taken was copied to Date Created.
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File Explorer Properties does not display a Date Cretaed:
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But, in ExifTool GUI, the correct File Created Date is diplayed:
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2

Might be Windows limitation for this field. Try a date 1980 or younger, that'll probably work.

3

Yeah, you’ll run into problems with a lot of operating systems and software if you start trying to set file dates to years long before computers even existed. This is not a bug.

4

A lot of photo software used to not recognize photo Exif dates before a certain date (1940s I think). Then they adapted and now do recognize earlier dates. Same with File Date Created.

Adobe Bridge, Adobe Lightroom Classic, Phototheca, and ExifToolGUI DO display the file Date Created as 1893-11-01.

So, perhaps it's not a bug, but I hope DOpus will make a change--as other applications have and recognize early dates. Other applications display the file Date Creates I set, but DOpus will not.

5

We’re not changing the way dates are represented inside the program for photos made in the 1800s.

That would complicate things greatly, break existing scripts, and potentially introduce bugs for something that would be useful only rarely to a tiny number of people.

6

Having said that, the Windows FILETIME (which we use in most cases) works back to the year 1601, and setting EXIF Date Taken to 1800 and then copying that to the file's Created and Modified timestamps (in the filesystem) works fine for me.

If you're doing this on something other than an NTFS drive, the limitation may be in the filesystem, not on the application side.

7

ExFAT (and FAT/FAT32) only support timestamps later than 1980.

1 Like
8

Thank you! That's it! The files had been copied to my client's EHD formatted as HFSJ for Mac! I use MacDrive because I work with Macs a lot.
I copied the files to an NTFS drive and the dates are fine.
By the way, there is no such thing as 'Exif Date Taken', so when that expression is used (or 'Exif Capture Date') it just contributes to peoples' confusion about photo date metadata. A photo can have no Exif DateTimeOriginal and still display a 'Date Taken'.