Airdrop export causes date created to be the date of transfer rather than original content creation date

This is true madness. How can I keep the original content creation date when transferring photos/videos from my phone to laptop via Airdrop?

Posted on Feb 14, 2022 2:23 AM

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Posted on Feb 14, 2022 2:31 AM

I asked the above question just so that I can provide the solution after many ridiculous hours of searching. It's a bit long winded and slightly intimidating if you haven't used terminal, but just follow these steps.


1) Download Exiftool from https://exiftool.org/ This will extract the media's original content creation date from the transferred media. Install it when it finishes downloading.


2) Airdrop all of your photos/videos from your phone and place them into a folder on the Desktop. Call it anything. For example: mymedia


3) Go to Finder -> Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal


4) Copy/paste the following command, ensuring to replace mymedia with whatever you called your folder:


cd Desktop/mymedia

5) Now copy/paste this command:


exiftool "-filecreatedate<createdate" . 


This will change all of the files in the folder to the original creation date


That's it. Comb through your media and see that the date created now shows the actual date the media was taken. I can't believe this is what we need to resort to, but hopefully it helps.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Feb 14, 2022 2:31 AM in response to dom237

I asked the above question just so that I can provide the solution after many ridiculous hours of searching. It's a bit long winded and slightly intimidating if you haven't used terminal, but just follow these steps.


1) Download Exiftool from https://exiftool.org/ This will extract the media's original content creation date from the transferred media. Install it when it finishes downloading.


2) Airdrop all of your photos/videos from your phone and place them into a folder on the Desktop. Call it anything. For example: mymedia


3) Go to Finder -> Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal


4) Copy/paste the following command, ensuring to replace mymedia with whatever you called your folder:


cd Desktop/mymedia

5) Now copy/paste this command:


exiftool "-filecreatedate<createdate" . 


This will change all of the files in the folder to the original creation date


That's it. Comb through your media and see that the date created now shows the actual date the media was taken. I can't believe this is what we need to resort to, but hopefully it helps.

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Airdrop export causes date created to be the date of transfer rather than original content creation date

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