The Advanced date manipulation action

File Multi Tool 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: pick a source date, optionally change it, and write it to any combination of destination fields.

Specific instructions exist for three common scenarios:

• Setting dates by using the date embedded in the file name
• Taking dates from files of the same name in another folder
• Incrementing a date using a sort order

but it supports a much wider range of scenarios.

The source

The Use: popup menu offers:

• Specific date, entered in the date and time fields
• Existing file creation date and Existing file modification date
• Existing DateTimeOriginal date and Existing DateTimeDigitized date, the EXIF timestamps
• Existing Content Creation date, Existing Media Create date, Existing QuickTime Create date, Existing QuickTime Modify Date/ EXIF DateTime and Existing QuickTime Creation Date for movies (see which date is used as the source)
• Existing Composite Content Creation date, the best available embedded date
• Existing Spotlight content creation date, Existing Spotlight content modification date, Existing Spotlight added date (the Finder’s Date Added column) and Existing Spotlight download date (set by Safari and other download applications)
• Enclosing Folder Creation Date and Enclosing Folder Modification Date
• Current Date and Time
• Date embedded in the file name (see the full details)
• Date taken from a file of the same name in a different hierarchy (see the full details)

The destination

The Overwrite: checkboxes choose the file system dates to write:

• File creation date
• File modification date

Both are subject to macOS’ date consistency rules.

Below them you choose the embedded fields for images and for movies separately, with the same options as the Set EXIF content creation timestamp action. The fields are explained in EXIF, IPTC and video timestamps explained.

The change

The Change: popup menu decides what happens to the source date before it is written:

• Keep unchanged writes the source date as it is
• Add time and Subtract time shift it by a number of hours, minutes, seconds, days, months or years
• Increment by sort order adds a growing interval to each file in turn, based on a sort order you choose; see incrementing dates

The file list previews every resulting date before you click Perform Changes.