File Modification Times with offsets

Would you like Bulk Rename Utility to offer new functionality? Post your comments here!

File Modification Times with offsets

Postby dgbear » Fri Apr 06, 2007 8:38 pm

Often when I download files from the web... the file modification time is set to the downloaded time... so the file sort order is determined by the order the files were downloaded. It would be great to use Bult Rename to change the file time to match the user specified file time.

Bulk Rename support changing this to one specific time...

It would be helpful to have the ability to change file modification time so that the time on each file has a small offset. This allows user defined sorts while sorting by file time.

Each file would be changed to the reference time + 0 to x offset.

Example 1 minute increment:
Selected File #1 - Reference Time.
Selected file #2 - Reference Time + 1 minute.

Thanks for your excellent work... Bult Rename is a great program!
dgbear
 
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Postby rob » Sat Sep 22, 2007 11:33 pm

I second this proposal. I'm in a situation where I've scanned thousands of old negatives, but obviously they all get a current time stamp. Most of these pictures were taken in the 70th and 80th, so I can only guess exactly when they were taken. I've been looking all over for a tool that allows me to do exactly what is suggested here, namely to take a single file as a reference file and then bulk modify the creation date/time fields for a set of files with a fixed increment, perhaps an hour or a day. First I was happy when I found BRU, but was disappointed when I found that the date/time function doesn't support this. (I couldn't get it to work at all actually, it kept changing the date to year 2045 whenever I used an offset!) And it seem like all other tools out there that have a time "offset" function work just like BRU.

Thanks for giving this proposal some consideration.
rob
 
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Postby Admin » Sun Sep 23, 2007 8:55 am

ACDSee Pro does exactly what you need, via its Batch Set Information (Ctrl+M) function.


Jim
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Postby rob » Sun Sep 23, 2007 1:20 pm

I installed a trial version of ACDSee but I cannot find a way of doing this with the Ctrl+M function either. Do you mind explaining how one would do that?

To clarify, I've got a folder with files. First I need to put these files in a for me specific order, which is NOT based on any existing names or attributes. I then need to set a specific date/time on the first file, and automatically increment and set this value by say 1 hour for all remaining files in the folder, in the order I've set them up.
rob
 
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Postby Admin » Sun Sep 23, 2007 1:42 pm

Apologies, it's Ctrl+T not Ctrl+M. But I'm sure you worked that out anyway.

Sorry, I thought ACDSee would do it. It does allow you to shift the timestamp, but it shifts based upon the "time of each file + constant", not "time of each file + shifting constant".

It sounds like a fairly unique requirement you have - at least, I can't imagine what you'd need it for, since timestamps are never a safe unit in Windows due to timezones and NTFS/FAT issues. I suspect you'd need a custom utility.

I could happily give you a custom build of BRU, which would utilise the existing logic but would add one hour as each file was processed. In exchange for you using the website Donation facility of course :-)


Jim
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Postby rob » Sun Sep 23, 2007 4:21 pm

Thanks for the offer, I don't mind to contribute but I would prefer to see a more generalised solution where everyone could benefit. My requirement doesn't seem to be unique because someone else started this thread :wink:

I will start another thread in the Support section, because there seem to be problems with the current Date/time function in BRU. So if you decide to fix those problems maybe you could implement some additional functionality at the same time to support what I (or we) are looking for. It could be just a simple list-choice dialog where you can specify the base for the delta shift, e.g. current date/time, current file date/time, fixed date/time, previous file date/time, etc. Thanks.
rob
 
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