This may be a Windows issue rather than Opus, but hopefully someone can explain things to me. I have sometimes found myself puzzled by the way files are dated.
Files have various dates recorded. The two of most interest to me are date created and date modified. However it seems that a file is considered to be modified when it is moved from one folder to another. While it could be argued that that is a modification it does mean I no longer know when that file was last modified.
Is there any way of keeping or recovering the modified date when mving the file to another folder?
I don't think it is, at least not by Opus or FE. You are not confusing modified with accessed, are you?
It depends on how the files are moved, and if they are on the same drive.
Moves on the same drive are usually done via a rename, which would not change the modified timestamp. (Unless it's a non-Windows NAS, where all bets are off as some have strange bugs, or something else unusual, like some other software scanning and modifying the file it sees as new, or .eml files where there's a bug in the Windows EML shell extension that changes their timestamps every time anything looks at them.)
Moves between different drives/partitions have to be done via a copy-then-delete, where preserving the timestamp may require extra work by the thing moving the files, and where not all things do that extra work.
In Opus, Preferences / File Operations / Copy Attributes / Preserve the timestamps of copied files controls whether the timestamps are preserved in the latter case.
When a photo is taken, along with the image, various data are recorded in the EXIFF. However when it comes to list the files I can display data such as Modified, Created and some others, but none of these are the Date taken that is in EXIFF. In may cases I seem to have files that were modified before they were Created.
How can I display this date and manipulate file order etc using that date?
Sorry - not very clear. A bit late!
Basically what I want to do is display an EXIFF datum in Opus.
The EXIF dates are available as columns, under the Picture Metadata category.
Thanks for your patience and help Leo - I did try the RTBM approach!
The discussion has gone a bit beyond my understanding (or need), but I am nevertheless grateful for the interest and discussion.
But to answer Jon's question - what do I want?
I want to list my photos -
File name - Size - date I took the photograph - date I modified it - folder where it is located
So I am using
Name - Size - Creation Date - Modified - Parent Folder
Is this correct or is there a better date selection? Creation Date sometimes displays dates which are obviously not the date I took the photo.
Creation Date comes from the filesystem and often indicates when that copy of the file was made. Date Taken is more likely to be the date the photograph was taken, but will depend on the type of file and whether the camera added the metadata, whether the metadata has since been removed when the file was edited/converted, and so on.
imcandrew,
I recommend you use the 'Date Taken' field/column to display the date the photo was taken. If the photo has an Exif DateTimeOriginal, that is the date that will be displayed in the Date Taken field.
If the photo has no Date Taken in DOpus, I do not recommend entering a date in the DOpus Date Taken field, as that results in incomplete date metadata being added to the file. I have brought this to the attention of the DOpus developers, so hopefully this will be fixed.
I add and correct dates using Adobe Bridge (free) because it adds complete date metadata in multiple metadata fields, and the new date is universally recognized by other applications.
Modified date is tricky because there are many different modifications that can be made to a photo (including renaming, cropping moving to a different drive etc.), but not all changes are recognized as a modification. In my photo management/photo organizing work, I don't pay attention to Date Modified because I track all my project tasks in a spreadsheet. For example, a line in my spreadsheet would have a date, a folder name, and the task/modification done - such as rotating, cropping, renaming, adding Keywords, etc.
Thank you both.
That's not the case from my own testing. Please keep discussion of that issue to the thread which was made for it.