A file's creation date

Ruby
1

Hello anyone,

I have written a script that organizes my ten thousand+ photos into a
year/month file structure using ‘exifr’ while eliminating duplicates.
Unfortunately some of the dates in the ‘EXIF’ block are bad or non
existing. In the latter case, the file’s creation date is the closest
I can come to as a date to use for the photograph, and even that is
sometimes flawed. However, I cannot find a method for retrieving the
creation date of a file. The file class has ‘atime’, last access
time, and ‘ctime’, lst changed time. I have googled and googled but
can’t find a way. Can anyone help?

Thanks ahead of time.

Pete
[email protected]

2

Peter L Versteegen [email protected] writes:

creation date of a file. The file class has ‘atime’, last access
time, and ‘ctime’, lst changed time. I have googled and googled but
can’t find a way. Can anyone help?

Thanks ahead of time.

Think ahead of time. I mean, if you want to keep the creation time,
you have to think of it when you create the file, because the unix
systems won’t do that for you.

For example, just before downloading your pictures, you could create a
directory named with the time stamp:

d=pictures-$(date +%Y%m%d) ; mkdir $d ; cd $d ;
fetch-pictures-from-camera

you can also use:
d=pictures-$(date +%Y%m%dT%H%M%S)
if you do that several times the same day.

There are also programs to edit the EXIF block, perhaps you could use
one to add the creation data in the files?

3

Pascal,

Thanks for your comments. I do download with into a time stamped
directory using QPICT. This does a great job.
I’m more careful now to make sure that my cameras are set to the
correct date and time, but this is all about past pictures, and the
date and time that you find in Finder’s Get Info. I would like to
retrieve the date and time that the file was created and eventually
insert them in the EXIF field. I have several hundred photos whose
EXIF fields are mangled!

Pete

4

Peter L Versteegen [email protected] writes:

Thanks for your comments. I do download with into a time stamped
directory using QPICT. This does a great job.
I’m more careful now to make sure that my cameras are set to the
correct date and time, but this is all about past pictures, and the
date and time that you find in Finder’s Get Info. I would like to
retrieve the date and time that the file was created and eventually
insert them in the EXIF field. I have several hundred photos whose
EXIF fields are mangled!

IIRC, on HFS, the creation time is kept. There’s a command
/Developer/Tools/GetFileInfo or something like that that should let
you get it in the shell, or perhaps from AppleScript, but I don’t it.