This is not my usual area of expertise, but I thought it was worth posting about because it is something that I’ve needed to do more than once. I hope that one day there will be an easier way to do this on a Mac. Here is the step-by-step how-to on changing a file’s creation date (adapted from: http://blog.grapii.com/2010/
Date Format Key:
YY – year (last two digits)
MM – month
DD – day
hh – hours, from 00 to 23
mm – minutes, from 00 to 59
How to change the creation date of a single file:
Note: changing the creation date will also change the modified date and set it the same as the creation date.
- Start the Terminal application (you can type “terminal” in Spotlight and press enter)
- Type the following in the command line, but do not hit enter/return. Replace YYMMDDhhmm with the desired date information:
touch -t YYMMDDhhmm
- Add a space to the end of your command line.
- Open a Finder window and locate the file you wish to change. Drag and drop the file into the Terminal window, and the file and path will be added to the end of the line you just typed. Here is an example of what the line should look like:
touch -t 1301312359 /Users/myname/Documents/Untitled.txt
1301312359 represents 2013 January 31 11:59 pm.
- To make the change, press enter. The creation date and last modified date should now be changed to the date you have specified.
The above steps also apply to changing the creation date of a folder, without affecting the individual creation dates of the files within that folder.
