RE: Windows Item Date

I’m helping recover and sort out about 500K files focusing on about 200K photos and videos which were “lost” in a disk crash (you guessed it, no backup!)  One head crashed, but the rest of the heads and platter surfaces were recoverable, although some directories were lost.  If files in lost directories were on another surface, they were recovered although the name info was lost.  Fortunately there were several copies of most files (often renamed apparently organization efforts before the crash), so by sifting through the mess, it seems like most of the files have been salvaged.  EXIF “Date taken” and XMP “Media created” helped bring sanity to the recovery effort in terms of helping to deduplicate files. The effort relied on lots of Lisp hash-tables and a few PowerShell scripts and file readers to load script outputs back into Lisp. The results are far from perfect in terms of file naming and organization, but folks are still really happy.

 

One of the things I appreciate about this community is it seems there is always someone who has been there before or has been close enough to provide very useful guidance, code, solutions, etc, especially with things in the Common Lisp “real world” interface.

 

Bob

 

From: Alexey Veretennikov <[email protected]> 
Sent: Thursday, September 4, 2025 12:49 PM
To: Tim Bradshaw <[email protected]>
Cc: Bob Kirk <[email protected]>; [email protected]
Subject: Re: Windows Item Date

 

For sorting/storing my photos from different devices to NAS I use my own tool as well, which takes the date/time information from jpegs using Zach'z beautiful zpb-exif, implemented in LispWorks: https://codeberg.org/fourier/mediaimport

It works pretty well to sort and store files backed up from android, iphone and couple of cameras I use from time to time.

 

BR,
/Alexey 

 

On Wednesday, September 3rd, 2025 at 22:00, Tim Bradshaw (as tfb at cley dot com) <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote:



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] <mailto:[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] <mailto:[email protected]> > 
Sent: Wednesday, September 3, 2025 2:12 AM
To: Bob Kirk <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> >
Cc: [email protected] <mailto:[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] <mailto:[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