Re: Windows Item Date

I am probably the only photographer in the world who uses shell scripts based on ExifTool to deal with archiving images. I am ashamed that I had to go through two other tools until I realised I should just write my own.

--tim

On 3 Sep 2025, at 19:17, Bob Kirk <[email protected]> wrote:



Beautiful! ExifTool is way more than sufficient, works great and obviously has years of knowledge built in! Thanks!

From: Tim Bradshaw <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, September 3, 2025 2:12 AM
To: Bob Kirk <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Windows Item Date

I think video typically uses XMP not EXIF. If there isn't an existing reader for it you'd need to write one or find a library.

If it was me I'd use ExifTool because it supports everything and you don't have to maintain it. You can get it to format its output in an easy-to-parse way (for timestamps this includes seconds since the Unix epoch, including fractional seconds if you want that).

--tim

On 3 Sep 2025, at 02:23, Bob Kirk (as bobkirk888 at gmail dot com) <[email protected] > wrote:



Does anyone have a Lisp (or other) utility to extract the “Item Date” for a file (or all the files in a directory) in Windows 10? For JPEG files this is commonly found in the EXIF property “Date taken”. For video files this is commonly found in the “Media created” date.

Various Windows docs refer to it as System.ItemDate and PKEY_ItemDate.

Using https://github.com/xach/zpb-exif I’ve been able to access “Date taken”. But I haven’t figured out how to access “Media created”.

It seems like there should be a way to get ItemDate to unify the two?

(And yes, this is different than CreationTime, LastWriteTime and all the other names given to these common file timestamps. It’s the date the picture or video was actually taken and is not tinkered with during file moves, copies, edits, etc.)

Thanks in advance for your help.

Bob