How To Change The Created And Modified Date Of Copied Or Downloaded Image Files

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Invariably when returning home from vacation I have a bunch of images and videos (iPhone and GoPro) that I want to add to my online library. I’m a stickler for correct meta data so seeing the dates / timestamps get clobbered to the current date / timestamp when copying or transferring was a point of frustration. Many of the tools I use to organize and edit these files use the Created date to sort or to build timelines so correcting each file manually was time consuming and laborious.

Enter the wonderful ExifTool by Phil Harvey. ExifTool gave me a simple and fast process to correct all of clobbered dates and timestamps straight from the CLI.

Since I’m using Mac I install the ExifTool via Homebrew:

➜  ~ brew install exiftool

Then, I create a unique directory to contain all the image & video files I want to update and subsequently copy / unzip / download them there. CD into that directory and run the following command:

➜  iCloud Photos exiftool '-FileCreateDate<CreateDate' '-FileModifyDate<ModifyDate' . -api QuickTimeUTC
    1 directories scanned
   10 image files updated
    1 image files unchanged

If you want to run the command on a directory you are not currently inside of just add the path to the files you want to update vs the current directory dot ‘.’ I show in the example.

Hugo date error

in

I was firing up a Gitlab Pages site using Hugo today and ran across the following error

Failed to get translated string for language "en" and ID "postedOnDate": template: :1:13: executing "" at <.Count>: can't evaluate field Count in type string

Though the magic of grep I found two locations for the offender: 

/themes/beautifulhugo/i18n/ja.yaml
/themes/beautifulhugo/i18n/en.yaml

You’ll find the following bit of code here

- id: postedOnDate  translation: "Posted on {{ .Count }}"

Remove Count from the setting as shown in the following snippet and you’ll be golden

- id: postedOnDate  translation: "Posted on {{ . }}"

A copy of Firefox is already open. Only one copy of Firefox can be open at a time.

in

I have seen this error when my Mac has auto rebooted for some reason. Firefox does not show up as a running process and can’t be found using the Force Quit… feature so what to do? It’s time to drop into a terminal session to go looking for a rogue child process that is keeping Firefox from opening.

(⎈ default)➜  ~ ps -ax | grep fire
1820 ??       312:27.66 /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox

There is the culprit and it needs to be killed

(⎈ default)➜  ~ kill -9 1820

Firefox should now launch without an issue. If for some reason that doesn’t get it done there are two alternative things to try:

  • delete the .parentlock file

  • delete an unknown identity

To delete an unknown identity run the following command at a terminal session

(⎈ default)➜  ~ /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -P

You should see a popup window that displays the identities known to Firefox. Delete the one(s) you didn’t create and restart Firefox.