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.

cURL and the Cloudinary API

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I was looking for a way to check Exif data on images I had uploaded to Cloudinary without having to write code. Turns out that cURL works perfectly here.​ You can add whatever bits to the end of the request string that suite your needs.  I was looking for Exif.

​The following cURL command should return back to you a nice JSON response (after setting the correct cloud name, API key and API secret of your account of course):

Authentication is realized via Basic Authentication over secure HTTP. Your Cloudinary API Key and API Secret are used for the authentication.

I was unable to get the -d option of cURL to work correctly so instead I encased the entire request in a matching set of ' '.  YMMV.

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