Which file dates actually matter?

All I wanted to do was change the date in some digital photos so that I would get the actual photo capture date showing in File Explorer, which I was able to do. However, I fell into the rabbit hole of photo date metadata. So I have to ask, what is the significance of all these different dates. And should I even care?

Because the date in my new digital camera was not set properly, I needed to fix the date before importing the files into Lightroom. Yes, I could have fixed the date inside Lightroom, but I store my photos in yyyy/mm/dd subfolders, and I want my photo file folders to be "accurate" even outside of Lightroom.

I used a nifty tool, EXIFToolGUI, Releases . FrankBijnen/ExifToolGui . GitHub, which is just a GUI for the fantastic command line EXIF Tool. ExifTool by Phil Harvey. Both programs are free.

After running the EXIFToolGUI Modify/ "File date modified as in EXIF", I examined the metadata output using the ALL tab. I was a bit surprised that there were so many metadata date variables:

• DateTimeOriginal
• CreateDate
• ModifyDate

Are these metadata used just by the Windows OS?

• FileModifyDate
• FileAccessDate
• FileCreateDate

By checking all the boxes



and inputting the date/time offset I was able to set the actual photo image capture time for DateTimeOriginal, ModifyDate (because I haven't done any editing yet), and FileModifyDate

The actual time that i ran EXIFToolGUI, was set int he FileAccessDate and the FileCreateDate.

However, the CreateDate was not modified at all. For Windows programs, does that matter?


Windows 10 64 Pro 2H22 v19045

UPDATE: Forgot to mention that the way Lightroom works, the "original" photo file is never modified, Instead, Lightroom creates a list of instructions to be applied when you print/email/etc a photo. For this reason, I want to preserve the right file dates in Windows Explorer.

Lightroom is different than say Photohop, which does modify the original file.