Copied folders - sort by original date

I've got a bunch of folders with photos that I've copied back to a local drive from a Macrium image. The problem I have is that every folder now has a created date of March 07 2020 and I cannot sort them by their original creation date. Is there any way to sort the folders by the original creation date of the photos inside them?

Edit: The only original date left appears to be the modified date of the photo files.

There is a possible method for this but is highly dependent on the source of the images, most images taken with modern digital cameras orr even smartphones contain a wealth of data, including the date and time of capture and of specific changes, this DATA is also dependent on the format of the image Raw Images straight out of the camera will show most, JPG images are also one that retains this data, this is part of the complete metadata package.

Windows explorer only gives access to a limited subset of data from that available. you therefore need a specialist program I use lightroom that is part of the Creative Cloud Photography pack but a free alternative from Adobe, Bridge, will do everything you wish, it may even allow automatic batch creation of folders from the files metadata, (I do this in Lightroom all the time), but definitely allow access to the internal data for manual control.

You may even find that for Photo management it is better suited than Windows explorer

Digital asset management software | Download free Adobe Bridge trial

This is free due to a marketing department error in which they announced that it was "Free for Ever" when it was included free with a one off release of photoshop many years ago, which Adobe have stated they will honour see here https://prodesigntools.com/free-adobe-bridge-cc.html

Barman58 said:

There is a possible method for this but is highly dependent on the source of the images, most images taken with modern digital cameras orr even smartphones contain a wealth of data, including the date and time of capture and of specific changes, this DATA is also dependent on the format of the image Raw Images straight out of the camera will show most, JPG images are also one that retains this data, this is part of the complete metadata package.

Windows explorer only gives access to a limited subset of data from that available. you therefore need a specialist program I use lightroom that is part of the Creative Cloud Photography pack but a free alternative from Adobe, Bridge, will do everything you wish, it may even allow automatic batch creation of folders from the files metadata, (I do this in Lightroom all the time), but definitely allow access to the internal data for manual control.

You may even find that for Photo management it is better suited than Windows explorer

Digital asset management software | Download free Adobe Bridge trial

This is free due to a marketing department error in which they announced that it was "Free for Ever" when it was included free with a one off release of photoshop many years ago, which Adobe have stated they will honour see here https://prodesigntools.com/free-adobe-bridge-cc.html

This sounds good Barman. I will check it out and see how it goes.

Kol12 said:

I've got a bunch of folders with photos that I've copied back to a local drive from a Macrium image. The problem I have is that every folder now has a created date of March 07 2020 and I cannot sort them by their original creation date. Is there any way to sort the folders by the original creation date of the photos inside them?

Edit: The only original date left appears to be the modified date of the photo files.

Is the Macrium image still available? Did you use Macrium to mount the image then copy the data? If so, you could do it again, but use ROBOCOPY instead to copy files and folders while preserving the original date and time.

robocopy source target /DCOPY:T

Ztruker said:

Is the Macrium image still available? Did you use Macrium to mount the image then copy the data? If so, you could do it again, but use ROBOCOPY instead to copy files and folders while preserving the original date and time.

robocopy source target /DCOPY:T

What exactly should the command line look like?

You can change the folder dates using NirSoft's FolderTimeUpdate

I use it a lot to set the modified time of a folder to that of the latest modified date of a file within it. It can also be used for created dates.

Denis

Kol12 said:

What exactly should the command line look like?

Exactly as I typed.

robocopy source target /DCOPY:T

where source is the path of the files/folders you are copying from
target is the path you are copying the files/folders to.

Not much more to it than that. Try it a few times from a Command Prompt until you get the exact path names you need. Enclose source and target in double quotes.

robocopy /? for more info

Try3 said:

You can change the folder dates using NirSoft's FolderTimeUpdate

I use it a lot to set the modified time of a folder to that of the latest modified date of a file within it. It can also be used for created dates.

Denis

Absolutely perfect.