The Advanced Date Manipulation Action

A Better Finder Attributes is designed to be easy to use even for novice users. This is why most of the actions available in the Action: popup menu do one very specific thing. A new user should be able to see what’s on offer and make a straightforward selection using just that menu.

Some tasks, however, are by their nature more complicated or less common. The Advanced Date Manipulation action available through the same popup menu is the Swiss army knife for date manipulations.

You can find specific instructions on how to configure it for two commons scenarios:

• Setting dates by using the date embedded in the file name

• Incrementing a date using a sorting order

but it supports a much wider range of scenarios.

Your first choice is to decide which date you want to use as the source of your new date.

The Use: popup menu offers many possibilities:

• Specific date

• Existing file creation date

• Existing file modification date

• Existing DateTimeOniginal

• Existing DateTimeDigitized

• Existing content creation date

• Existing Media Creation Date (see explanation here)

• Existing QuickTime/ TIFF Create Date (see explanation here)

• Existing composite content creation date (see explanation here)

• Existing Spotlight content creation date

• Existing Spotlight content modification date

• Existing Spotlight added date (corresponds to what’s shown in the Date Added column in the Finder)

• Existing Spotlight Download Date (set by Safari & other download apps)

• Date embedded in the file name (see full details here

• Date taken from a file of the same name in a different hierarchy (see full details here)

The second choice is to which fields you want to write the newly created date.

• Overwrite: File creation date overwrites the file system’s creation date

• Overwrite: File modification date overwrites the file system’s modification date

Both these dates are subject to macOS’ date consistency rules.

You can then choose different target fields for images and movies separately. This is described in more detail here.

The Change: popup menu gives you a few options on what to do with the source date before you write it to its new fields:

• Keep unchanged means that the new date value gets written unchanged to its new destination

• Add time & Subtract time allows you to add a number of hours, minutes, seconds, days, months or years before the date value gets written to its new target

• Finally Increment by sort order allows you to add a number of hours, minutes, seconds, days, months or years to the date based on some sorting critera. Discover more about this here.

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