I’ve spent almost an hour at Microsoft Community trying to get a simple answer to a simple question and now I’m frustrated enough to kill someone.
I have photos and videos in my downloads folder. I am trying to organize them. But these photos and videos have multiple dates attached to them: date created, date modified, and date accessed.
I understand date accessed: that’s the last time I opened the file.
But “created” and “modified” are driving me insane! According to the dates, some of these files were “modified” BEFORE they were “created”! And nobody at the Microsoft message boards can give a coherent explanation for how this is possible. And at this point I don’t care anymore; I just have one simple question:
“Date created” and “Date modified”: which of these is the date I downloaded the photo/video to my computer?
BTW, there’s no specific reason to blame Microsoft for this. These file dating concepts are ancient and implemented in every single modern operating system in the market, so you would be as distressed on a Macintosh or a Linux PC.
Usually Date Created is the date the file was created on that particular device.
Date Taken, Date Modified and Date Last Saved are going to be whenever you took the picture, unless you somehow modified it in some way. In addition, most cameras save the actual date and time taken in the EXIF data along with a bunch of other interesting stuff.
Date Accessed is the date you last looked at the image.
So for a photo I took on July 8th during my vacation this summer, the Date Taken, Date Last Saved and Date Modified are 7/8/2022. The date created is 8/17/22, because that’s when I copied them to my hard drive from my phone. The date accessed is today (11/20/22) because that’s when I last viewed the picture.
So for your purposes, “Date Created” is going to be the date when you copied it to that computer, and Date Modified is going to be the date it was taken assuming you didn’t edit them in some fashion.
I went with “disk” instead of “device” because, when I checked my own photos (to make sure I remembered correctly), I noticed the Date Created was from before my current computer even existed.
I had migrated my hard drive from my previous computer. New SSD, same old HDD.
(Now that I think of it, I probably should have used “drive” instead of “disk.” But I always think of both HDDs and SSDs as the disk of the computer.)
After playing around a bit, it’s even more specific. Copying from one directory to another on the same drive still resets the Date Created on the copy, but not the other dates.
I believe that’s only for copies, which are treated like new files.
When I tried moving a file from one folder to another on the same drive, the Date Created was kept the same. But when I copied the same file, the Date Created on the copy was today’s date (and time).
This makes sense to me: technically, when you move a file on the same drive, the system just renames it. It doesn’t actually change where the file is on disk, but just changes the folder it is listed under.
This isn’t really so much of an issue with Windows per se as it is the increasingly inaptly named “New Technology File System” (NTFS) file system. NTFS was never designed to support highly networked storage or capture metadata associated with file transfers across systems, so “accessed”, ”modified”, and “created” stamps are often inconsistent (as can be “owned by” and file permissions). Microsoft also tacked on their quasi-softlinking system which is incredibly fragile (often breaks just because you modify upper level director filenames) and is generally fussy when having to interact with other types of file systems. NTFS should really be considered at end of life given that it was first released in 1993 but although Microsoft has been promising to release their Resilient File System (ReFS) on their desktop operating systems for nearly a decade, it has still only been featured on their server OSs since 2012.
That being said, there are plenty of reasons to hate Microsoft for its mendacious mediocrity to forcing one shitty browser product after another upon users. The fact that they can’t deploy a modern file system on their end user operating systems is just one facet of a much greater problem that Microsoft has with innovation on any scale.
I learned years ago that Microsoft Community is the last place to go for any sort of logical assistance. There’s no end of alternative help at your service (fingertips). A general search request (Google, GoDuckGo etc.) for; ‘what does date modified mean on a file’, or something to that effect, would have brought up any number of helpful responses.
tenforums; thewindowsclub; howto; lifewire; tomshardware; bleepingcomputer . . .
Thank you, BigT. After I calmed down and my common sense returned to me (which did take a while), I downloaded a couple videos from YouTube that were posted years ago and discovered you are right. Today was listed as Date Created; Date Modified was years ago on both videos. Thanks again.
I’ll keep that in mind for the future, Keith.