Date Created is Ambiguous for Image Files

baumgrenze said:

Windows tells me that today, the date I moved them from the iPhone (where they have a precise EXIF date) is the date I created them. The Windows date is completely useless. In another column called "Date Modified" there are several dates, none of which make any sense to me. I have not edited any of them in any way. When I add a column for the "Date Taken" it is not populated, nor is "Date Acquired."

Date created is working exactly as it's supposed to work. It indicates when a file is first created on a drive. It's important for forensics, but not much else. It's not a reliable indicator of when a photo was taken or a document was authored. When a photo contains EXIF data, then "Date taken" should be the property you want. However, with MOV files, that metadata does not always exist, which is not a Windows issue. Are you sure that the Date taken is in the EXIF data for those particular MOV files? The EXIF data is part of the file, so there's no reason why it would be there on the iPhone and not on Windows.

If the file does not have EXIF data, one possible workaround is to "preserve" the Date created from the source media by using a copy program that has that option, such as Robocopy (with /DCOPY:T) or FastCopy. In that case, the file is copied to the new drive and then the Date created property is edited to match the value from the source media. In the long run, you don't want to rely on Date created, so it would the be best to use a utility that can set Date taken in the file's metadata from the Date created value. I'll take a look around for such a tool.

But let's first clear up this mystery regarding the EXIF data. I'll grab my wife's iPhone and see what I get. We always just let Google Photos gather the pictures from our phones (mine's Android), so we've never seen this issue.

I ran some tests with the iPhone and found that all of the JPG files have "Date taken" in the EXIF data. The MOV files don't have that attribute. The MOV file's Date modified property may match the actual date taken, but not if the video was subsequently modified (which includes trimming and compressing). Date created, by default, will end up being the date/time the video is copied to another drive.

Directory Opus includes an option (which is checked by default) to preserve Date created, so I tried that with the iPhone and it worked great. That is, the copied files were given the same Date created as the source files.

For MOV files, Directory Opus's metadata pane just showed the standard file attributes (e.g. Date modified, Date created) and the extended attributes of Comment, rating, and tags. Whereas JPG files have all of that plus a long list of photo-specific data, including Date taken.

So, it comes down to a limitation of the MOV file format. It looks like the best you can do is preserve the Date created from the iPhone by using a file manager such as Directory Opus. The iPhone mounts as MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) so I couldn't see any way to use Robocopy or FastCopy with it, but I may have missed something. I didn't want to fiddle with it too much and Directory Opus was easy, so I used that.