How to keep original creation date?

Hello,

when writing files I like to keep the original file’s “date created” & “date modified”.
(i.e. XnView has a checkbox for that.)
Is there a workaround in Retrobatch?

Thanks,
Frank

Hello @Bomboclaat, welcome!

So are you referring to the create and modified dates that show up in the Finder, or are you talking about the image metadata tags that are part of the image? The metadata tags should be preserved through processing (unless you add a node to remove them).

I’m referring to the dates that show up in the Finder (file createModify date), not the EXIF metadata.
For organizing photos within the Finder folder structure I need to preserve the original file dates.

OK, thanks for the explanation. There’s currently no way to do this, but I can see about adding it in an update, or at least via a quick JS plugin.

Actually, this was pretty easy to put together in a JS plugin. If you visit the page Retrobatch JavaScript Nodes and download the “Set Original Create and Modified Dates” plugin, install it, restart Retrobatch, and then place the new node after the write node, you should get what you’re after.

It’s only been tested on my computer, so YMMV. But let me know how it works out for you!

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That works perfect! That plugin adds an important feature!

Hi
The plug-in didn’t work for me unfortunately. On version 1.4.4. Would love to do this though

Just tried it on my end, on MacOS 12, and it worked out alright. What version of MacOS are you using? And are you putting the plugin after the write node?

Thanks a lot! I misread the initial explication and put the plugin before the write node. Now it works like a charm!

Just wanted to say thanks for putting this together a couple of years ago. My scenario was wanting to convert some old photos saved in TIFF format into a non-lossy, but smaller format (PNG in this case), but didn’t want to lose the original created and modified dates.

Like the original poster, I was looking for a checkbox in the Write Images node settings to do this, so would be great to add it in there one day, but understand if this plug-in is the best we ever get. Thanks again for producing such a great app! :slight_smile:

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