mrwul said:
I am not sure why it is a 'bad idea' to redate the files to be in line with the exif-date.
For the reasons I listed. Windows actually cares about when you modified the file, and can use that information for things like deciding when a file needs to be backed up; the disk caching algorithms also most likely depend on when files were last modified, as do disk defragmentation algorithms. Basically, you *have* changed the file by writing metadata to it, and unless you have a specific reason why Windows needs to be lied to about this fact (and yes, legitimate reasons *can* exist), you shouldn't do it, or it might adversely affect your backsup, disk caching performance, fragmentation, etc. It's not likely to "break" anything, but really, file modifed and date taken are just two very different things, and the OS provides different fields for these different things, and it does so for a reason.
What you have *not* changed, of course, is the EXIF date, so really, *that* is the date you should be using to indicate when the pciture was taken, not WIndows' file-modified, which really is meant to indicate when the file was modified, not when the picture when taken.
Many people who reset the file-modified date do it because they have some other program they use that is not able to easily access the EXIF date and they need some day to make those programs aware of when the picture was taken. I think the better solution to that is to adopt a file namign scheme in which the time (and time, if you like) shot becomes part of the file name. My images, for exactly, are of the form MJS_yyMMdd_1234.PEF, whiere MJS are my initials, yyMMdd is the date shot, and 1234 is the sequence number from the original filename assigned by the camera. That way the file name itself encodes the date shot, and soprting by name autoamtically sorts according to when the image was shot as well.
Again, if you really have a very specific reason why you *need* to do this in order to accomplish something that cannot be accomlished "correctly", and are willing to accept the risk in terms potentially impeding Windows' backup, caching, and defragmentation efforts, then ACDSee *does* provide a mechanism for this. But in light of how *not recommended* the practice is in generl, having to kick off an additional batch job to do this doesn't seem so unreasonable to me. Especially given that, as I said all of the rest of your steps can be combiend into one.
Posted On June 8, 2009 - 03:14 PM (5 months ago) (
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