Change date and time
of files and folders
Comfortably change the creation and modification date and time of any file or folder or take them over from the metadata (Exif etc.) in images, file names or .xmp sidecar files.
Certainly you are familiar with the following situation or a similar one:
You finally found the time to download your photos from the cloud and start sorting them. In the Explorer or Finder you clicked on the heading of the date column so that you can assign them correctly in terms of time. Normally, the photos should now all be displayed sorted by the creation date. But as it turns out now, all photos have the same date, namely the one on which they were downloaded from the cloud. What are you doing now? Use a function well hidden somewhere in the operating system, to change the date of each individual photo? Certainly not, because then you’ll be sitting there with the amount of photos the day after tomorrow. That’s where Touch can help you. With just a few clicks, you can take the correct creation date of your photos from the Exif data they contain. In a matter of seconds, all your photos will have the correct date and you can start sorting them easily. And if your photos are from the Caribbean and were therefore taken in a different time zone, you can quickly correct that with Touch.
Of course, there are any number of other use cases for this app. For example, at the beginning of a week, a customer scans all the documents from the previous week and then gives them the correct date so that they can be sorted easily.
The name Touch is derived from the program with which you can change the date and time of folders and files in the command line interface. This app has a similar range of functions, but the desired changes can be applied much more comfortably and extensively.
The modern and clear user interface allows you to drag and drop folders and files onto the app. You can set whether to process the files immediately or later when clicking the process button. This way you have the choice to process many files very quickly.
The features
- This app will modify the creation and modification date and time of folders and files like you want them.
- Exif, IPTC, XMP metadata from inside images may be used as source for creation and/or modification date and/or time.
- If there exist sidecar (.xmp) files, the contained data can be taken to modify the corresponding files’ date and/or time.
- Sometimes it can be useful to modify the date and/or time of files relative. I.e., this could be the case if there exist photos with a recording date that is shifted by some hours, because they were taken in a different time zone.
- Date and time can be imported from the file’s name. This can be very useful to modify the date and time of images. Date and time may be formatted like this:
YYYY[ -_./]MM[ -_./]DD hh[ -_./:]mm[ -_./:]ss (example: 2022-02-28 14:15:30)
YYYY[ -_./]MM[ -_./]DD hhmmss (example: 2022/02/28 141530)
YYYYMMDD hhmmss (example: 20220228 141530)
- You can modify the dates (times) separately or altogether, use the current date and time or any date and time you enter yourself.
- You decide whether to modify folders and/or files. Hidden files and folders may be included or excluded however you want.
- Decide whether to process packages and bundles (like apps) as folder or single file.
- The processing results will be shown immediately in a clear table after applying the changes.
- The app’s settings will be remembered for its next launch.
If you would like to find out more about how the app works, you are welcome to download the manual here.
Important hint
This App changes the date and time attributes of files. It does NOT change a file’s contents. Some software depends on date and time from inside a file, like Apple Photos, Adobe Lightroom and PhotoShop or Microsoft Word. These programs will therefore in some circumstances NOT show the correct date and time. Instead they show what they find inside the file. This is NOT a bug. This is by design!
Notes
- On MacOS dates from 1677 to 2262 can be applied.
- With Windows dates from 1601 to 2262 can be used.
touch, date, time, file, image, photo, creation date, modification date, change date, change time, exif