I’ve bought a second hand MacBook Pro for video editing and I’m trying to learn the workflow. In the world of Windows, if I knock a video together in Davinci and export it I can right click on the video, select “Properties” then “Details” to access and set the “Media created” date. This is useful if, say, I filmed stuff at Christmas but didn’t edit it together until the New Year but want it to appear in video apps and folders dated as Christmas rather than some random other date. Many applications respect this date.
I can’t find similar functionality in MacOS, which means that my videos appear in file managers etc based on the date I exported them from Davinici Resolve rather than the date they were shot. Is there a simple way to adjust this attribute in Finder or similar? (Note that I’m not trying to adjust the filesystem “Created” attribute as that gets clobbered by the “Modified” attribute and doesn’t achieve what I need.) Thanks in advance.
Hmm. To slightly answer my own question, it seems I can do this from the terminal by installing exiftool and running exiftool -CreateDate="2025:12:25 07:00:00" this_should_be_christmas.mov to do the job. This certainly works with Immich to move the video to the correct date in the timeline. But surely there must be some way to set this from the GUI?
Right click - get into ?
Or open the video in preview and command & i
Or in any finder window right cilck the columns and add crerated date (or hit command j for more options
I think these let me see the filesystem level created date (but not change it) but don’t let me see or change the media creation date metadata?
Its a bit of a roundabout way but these steps will change the created date -
- Import the video into the Photos app
- Select the video then in the menu click Image > Adjust Date and Time
- Set the time to whatever you want
- File > Export > Export 1 video
So it’s doable however exiftool is faster.
I use an app called ‘Edit Time’ which you can download for free from the App Store on the MAC.
Free version allows you to change either or both of the Created and Modified time or date stamps one file at a time. Or you can buy the full version for a few £'s that will allow you to bulk edit ie set the date on a batch of files.
Thanks all. That is very helpful. Glad I’m not alone in coming up against this! The MacBook is lovely but Finder is useless!
