Retain dates of movies when exporting

No. The dates on the photos are retained in the Exif metadata which records the date and time of the exposure on the camer, so the date on the file is unimportant. However there is no Exif for video.

There are various utilities that you can use to edit the date on a file

You will need a 3rd party application to change the file created date on the file after exporting it out of iPhoto. But that date could change again if the file is copied to another volume and the new copy may be different.

The best solution, IMO, is to rename the video with the date it was taken with a file name something like this: 1961-06-15-Old Toad Skydiving.mov. Change the title to reflect the date and content and export out of iPhoto with Kind = Original and File Name = Title.

OT

This retains the file’s creation date, but there’s one not so small problem with this approach:

Well there's two problems with this approach - it's not supported and risks damaging your Library.

There is no way to do what you want.

Although I think that iPhoto should be smart enought to understand how to retain the date video was created on export, a work around is to drag and drop the movie files into a finder window. This appears to preserve the date the video was shot.

Be wary with Drag and Drop and video. In several versions of iPhoto the movie isn't exported at all, just a thumbnail. So be sure to actually play the video to make sure it works correctly.

My workaround is to export photos and videos from iPhoto into subdirectories by events. Then I run a perl script https://github.com/brablc/****/blob/master/iphoto-touch-mov-by-prev-image in each dir (using shell), which sets dates to videos according to the closest previous image. If you have an event without photo, then you would have to touch the file yourself using the date of the event (I export events untitled so the subfolders are actually the dates).

It's a little laborious, but I just went through and grabbed 160 videos out of iPhoto yesterday and was able to keep the original date. Just go into Spotlight and type in the name of the file (this was easiest by first exporting all of the files as orginal so you have all of the file names), looking for the oldest date. Right click and Show in Enclosing Folder. I then copied that into the directory where I did my export, overwriting the file with the date of the export. Probably went through the 160 in less than 30 minutes, and had all of my correct dates!

I found it annoying as well, so I tried the following (carefully and successfully):

1) Use a smart folder in iPhoto to grab all videos for a given year

2) Export using Original and "add event name" (Probably optional if you want a single big directory)

3) Using Terminal, go to each directory (One per event or one big one)

4) Use a script with touch, where you find the original in your actual Library, and use its date

for i in `ls`; do touch -r "`find ~/Pictures/iPhoto\ Library/Masters/2014 -name $i`" $i; ls -l $i; done

***This was for movies taken in 2014. Would be slower if you ended the search with "Masters".

5) Import into iMovie 9.0.9 (New version ***** <- apologize for honesty) with the "Move" option and any Event you want

6) Delete from iPhoto

Note: probably a good idea to backup your library first...

hello and sorry for my english

Can you please explain how you do to retain movie date in aperture ?

If i modify a movie and try to export this version, the date is now the current date.

Can you please help me ?

Thanks

Why not just rename the video files with the date taken and a short description before importing into iPhoto. Something like this: XXXX-XX-XX-Brief Description.mov. I do the same for all videos and photos before importing into iPhoto. It looks like this:

There are numerous file renaming apps that can do the job either singularly or batch change. A little effort up front save a lot of time later on trying to identify files and images.