Batch process - retain original file date

[GFS]

Hi,

I'm finally preparing to move away from Aperture, which I still use for its DAM, which remains by far the best, as far as I can see.  Sigh.  I have several thousand old tiff files, that are unsupported in 64bit (you can test this by starting up in 64bit mode on you Mac).  Happily, whilst AFP 1.6.7 choked and crashed horribly trying to batch convert these old .tif files to modern versions, via New Batch Job, AFP 1.7beta cruises through them with much appreciated speed and solidity.  So far I have made a >2,000 batch conversion.

Problem/Question:

Obviously the Batch Job is producing a new Tiff LZW file, which has a new date.  Is there any way within AFP that I can set the date to the same as the original file (I can't find anything) or does anyone have any suggestions how I can keep the original file date?  I suppose it could be done in the Finder via Applescript, but this is beyond my capabilities.  Seems like this is something that could be desirable for quite a few people.

[v_kyr]

There are a bunch of Unix operating system CLI tools (command line interface) which do deal with file attribute or file date/time changing etc, you can use these from inside a terminal, or use some GUI frontend tools to those...

• Change a File’s Last Modified and Creation Dates
• BatchTouch
• FileTime
• FileMultiTool
• Touch 1.5
• How to Modify 'date created' on any file
• mac osx bulk touch files
• ... and so on, do an internet search ...

 

[GFS]

Thank you for the reply.

These don't address the issue though.  The question is not how to change a file's date, it is how to retain the date of the original file when batch converting (the exif date ... not the Finder date).

[v_kyr]

Well you didn't explicitely talked about the Exif date in your initial post.  However you can try Exiftool for inspection (it's also part of APh release versions) and such Exif data related purposes, there are also some GUI tools for that one like pyExifToolGUI etc.

[GFS]

Thanks again and I should have been more specific about which date, but those still don't answer the question.  FWIW and not relevant for much longer, Aperture can batch change EXIF date.  So I already have this ability.

The question is how to batch convert (or retain in AFP when using Batch Job) the original file date, so that the new file's date matches the old (original) file's date.  I have many thousands of these images, so doing them one-by-one would be time consuming.

[v_kyr]

If it alters these and doesn't retain the original ones during batch processing (...didn't tried out, since I don't use it for such photo image tasks at all), I doubt you can setup/customize a different APh behavior here then. You would have to use some other tools for batch processing which do keep the orig Exif date settings.

[walt.farrell]

On Windows, Affinity Photo (1.6 or 1.7) Batch Processing preserves the original EXIF information about when the photo was shot.

One possibility: Click the "..." button in the New Batch Job dialog and make sure that "Embed Metadata" is enabled.

If it is enabled, and the EXIF "Date Shot" information is not maintained, you may have found a Photo bug on Mac.

[R C-R]

32 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

If it is enabled, and the EXIF "Date Shot" information is not maintained, you may have found a Photo bug on Mac.

I did not have any TIFF file samples with embedded EXIF data to test with but I have a bunch of JPEG files output from an iPhone 5S that do. So I batch converted a group of them to TIFF in Affinity Photo, & then back again to JPEGs & to Affinity native files as well.

Not definitive I know, but in no case was any of the embedded EXIF data altered.

[GFS]

Thanks for the replies.

As you said Walt and R C-R,  AFP is respecting the metadata, which is great and my problem was coming from the way that Aperture handles files which are lacking a metadata date.  In fact, what it does is it displays the Finder date in the exif date field, but if these files are exported *as originals*, that date is not included, presumably because it is not a part of the original file.  So that is as it should be.  If you export as a version, then the date is applied, which equally, makes sense.  On top of this, it turns out that it's trivial to set the date permanently in the originals, within Aperture.  So my problems is solved without any headache ... just a lot of fiddling, checking, searching etc.  Also good to see that AFP is handling batch conversion in a useful way.