Preservation of "Date Created" property for mp4 files when copying

ffrree · 18 Dec 2018

It seems that copying some video files ( at least mp4 ), the "Date Created" property is not reliably preserved, especially to and from USB drives. About 10% of them would have the copy time time stamp instead of the original "Date Created" time stamp on the destination file, and it appears, that larger files are more susceptible. And it is not file dependant, recopying the same file, would yield different results.

The Encoding time stamp seems to be preserved all the time though.

Any reason why?

I need to use the "Date Created" time stamp preserved when downloading from my camera or SD cards, so I can sort the different files in time sequence, from different camera by the "Date Created" date. The Encoding Time stamp is not workable from Explorer.

Any idea what's the problem.

dalchina · 18 Dec 2018

Just wondering- have you considered using the 'Media Created' date - available as a column in file explorer?

ffrree · 18 Dec 2018

dalchina said:

Just wondering- have you considered using the 'Media Created' date - available as a column in file explorer?

Thanks, I looked at that, it seems not all mp4 files has that data. It is all very confusing with all these different media and formats. Then the Explorer copying unreliability does not help at all.

dalchina · 18 Dec 2018

Try 'Date' :
Windows 7 Explorer Columns: meaning of ? - Super User

PiKo · 18 Dec 2018

A similar issue regarding pictures was addressed in another forum. One suggestion was to use robocopy.

ffrree · 18 Dec 2018

PiKo said:

A similar issue regarding pictures was addressed in another forum. One suggestion was to use robocopy.

Thanks, I'll look into that. Looks like it actually duplicate the file rather than "copying it" loosely....will look deeper.

cheers

Try3 · 18 Dec 2018

Instead of straightforward copying, use the built-in utility RoboCopy for anything for which you want to preserve creation date. It has an add-on interface - see RichCopy - Joshua Hoffmann if you want to work through a UI.

In cases where your source [SD card, camera memory] cannot be assigned a drive letter you will not be able to use RoboCopy and the copying operation will set Creation date-time to the same as the Modified date-time [or the current Date-Time].

Where I have this limitation, I just copy the files over then sort them out afterwards. To do this sorting out, I drop the files onto this batch file or a shortcut to it and it sets the Creation date-time to the same as the LastModified date-time.

SetCreatedFromDLM.bat

Code:

For %%X in (%*) do call :Processing %%X
GoTo EndSetCreated
:Processing
powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy ByPass Get-ChildItem  -LiteralPath "'%~1'" ^| %% {$_.CreationTime = $_.LastWriteTime} 
GoTo :EOF
:EndSetCreated
Pause at end during testing

You can delete or remark out the Pause … line when you are happy with the batch file

To make this more convenient, I have put a shortcut to this batch file in my SendTo folder** so I can just select the files I want to sort out then right-click, SendTo, SetCreatedFromDLM
[** %UserProfile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo]

Denis