How to Change Creation Date of Any File on a Mac

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Asif Ahmed
Asif Ahmedhttp://techtippr.com
Founder and Cheif Editor of Techtippr, Get in touch with me on Twitter or Enjoy my Stories on Instagram. I think they are interesting. :-)

Check out this easy way to change the creation date of a file on your Mac computer.

There are many reasons why you would want to change the creation date. One of which is is better organization of files.

If you save a file on a flash drive, on SSD, or even your computer, it makes things easy for you to sort the files according to the creation date, so that you can get to the file you want.

It is also helpful when you use apps like Google photos where you can upload unlimited photos and videos.

You may have made edits to some of your photos using Lightroom,  Photoshop, or any other photo editing app, and now the creation date has changed, but you want to get the original creation date of the file so that it appears where it should appear in Google photos.

Here is how you can change the creation date of any file in Mac.

You will be required to access the terminal on your Mac computer. If you can’t see it it will be available in utilities in apps.

Method 1

Once you launch the terminal you need to type in the following command, in the following order.

SetFile -d ‘MM/DD/YYYY hh:mm:ss’

If you want to change the creation date to 13th November 2010 at 12:30 PM, here is how you will have to write the command.

SetFile -d ’11/13/2010 12:30:55′

After that, you need to drag and drop the file you want to change the creation date. And hit enter. When you right-click on the file and go to get the info you will notice the creation date is changed.

Method 2

Alternatively, you can also use the following command

touch -t YYYMMDDhhmm

If you want to change the creation date of the file to 15th July 2015 at 12 PM, you need to use the format mentioned in the command.

touch -t 201507151200 

After writing this command, hit the space bar, to make a space, and then drag and drop the file to change its creation date.

If you have multiple files to change, select multiple files and drag and drop them all.

Note: If you happen to accidentally delete any of the files while dragging and dropping, use data recovery software immediately and restore files. Remo File Recovery is such an application that allows you to recover files deleted under circumstances like accidental file deletion, files lost after Cut-paste, etc.

If you want to change the Modified Date of a file, you need to write -mt instead of -t.

touch -mt YYYMMDDhhmm

You can then upload it to Google photos and it will appear right where it should appear.

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