Y2K creation date

file system dates have a limited storage space allocated. Therefore, a finite range of dates is available. On OS X, that range begins on Jan 1 1970.

You are confusing the file with the content of the file. A file is a physical storage location that must conform to the file system limitations. The image stored in the file may have an origination date before the available file system minimum. That information is called "metadata" and for photos is in the EXIF data. OS X also has its own metadata, and iPhoto and Photos stores its own metadata in the "Library"

So, you can't set a file creation date prior to Jan 1 1970. You should just edit the EXIF date.

It has little to do with Y2K (storing dates in programs using only 2-digit years), though both are related in the fact that it is a storage limitation. However it's not much of a limitation as you cannot create a file earlier than that date as computers really didn't exist, then. You can google for the history of the UNIX Epoch which may explain the choice of starting date. But, as I already stated, starting any earlier is utterly useless wrt a computer file system as no file could have been created prior to that date.

You should find another photo management solution other than the Finder as its limitations are not suitable to you.

I must confess I am not completely understanding your issue, however I can make the following comments.

• If the camera has its date set properly and supports EXIF it should set the EXIF date in the file correctly, I would think all camera these days support EXIF
• When transferring the photo to a Mac the Mac may only look at the file creation date and not the EXIF value, it could be some more stupid cameras cause the files to have a data value of zero which might translate to Jan 1 1970
• It could be the date the Mac uses is the date the photo is copied to the Mac, if so and the Mac has its date set wrong perhaps because the battery has gone flat then this may again cause a default value for the date
• It is possible to modify the creation date of a file and set it to a specific date using the following command in Terminal.app

touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.SS] filename

See http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2012/11/linux-touch-command/ for more details and/or do man touch in Terminal.

The following webpage contains a shell script which reads EXIF data from the files and sorts them in to folders based on the EXIF date. This script could be used as a starting point to write your own which also reads the EXIF date from the file and then uses the touch command to set the Finder creation date to match.

See http://mikebeach.org/2011/12/10/bash-script-to-automatically-sort-photos-into-fo lders-based-on-exif-data-for-ubuntu-linu…

You could even put this script in to either an Automator service or make an AppleScript droplet application.

Any of the photo management apps, Photos, Lightroom, Picassa, etc., would provide the ability to see and edit the date shot. Photos uses the EXIF data to import that date, but it does not edit EXIF data. Your scanned images would not have any EXIF metadata as they were not created by a digital camera.

The Finder displays very little metadata, if at all. Since Apple makes an app to handle photo management, I would doubt they would put much effort into modifying the Finder to show the date shot of a photo.

There is currently no credible reason for this

I already supplied that reason. There are no computer files that could have possibly been created before that date.

You ou are confusing the file with the content. A "file" is just a wrapper that holds the content, like an envelope holds a letter. The letter is not the envelope just as the image is not the file. You want to use the file system data to manage your content metadata and it does not.

I could type the words to Moby Dick into a Word document. That doesn't make the creation date of Moby Dick the date I saved the file. I have a copy of it stored inside a file just as you have a "copy" of real life stored in a file.

Dodoche49 wrote:

My problem still lies in the automatic modification dates prior to 01.01.1970 by the Mac OS. There is currently no credible reason for this (indeed, in the 1970s, using only the last two digits for the year resulted in savings of memory that was in that time very expensive).

UNIX Epoch date.(used widely in Unix-like and many other operating systems and file formats.)

>I wanted, however, whether a member of the Mac Forum had found a way to display photos/scans with dates prior to January 1, 1970 in Finder (with an

> additional column EXIF) or in another application

If you need to assign a date to the photo, and EXIF in not possible, you can always add the date to the file comments.