Change Date Of Creation Of Files

There are times when you may need to change date of creation of files (or date modified/accessed). Perhaps you have transferred a lot of photos to a new computer and want to reset the file creation date to equal the actual date the picture was taken?

Or you might have a work/college report where you want to pretend that you worked on it earlier than you did? A free utility from Nir Sofer’s collection called BulkFileChanger can do all that – and as the name suggests, you can change the attributes of multiple files at once.

What Is BulkFileChanger?

  • A free, tiny and portable (doesn’t need to be installed) program.
  • BulkFileChanger works on all versions of Windows from XP up to and including Windows 7.
  • You can change date of creation of files from multiple folders – and the date/time modified or accessed too.
  • It also provides a simple way to change the file attributes (Read Only, Hidden and System) if necessary.

Download the program in a zip file from Nirsoft here. Unzip (extract) the zip file and run the BulkFileChanger.exe program file.

Anyone used to NirSoft utilities will be familiar with the layout and find their way around easily but the following is a brief guide (it is worth testing on an unimportant file first until you get the hang of it).

Add files to the list window – the easiest ways to do this are:

– Press F2 or click the ‘Add Files’ icon on the menu bar to select files to add
– Copy and paste (CTRL + V) files from Explorer into the list window
– Drag and drop files from Explorer into the list window

You can remove files from the list by using the ‘Remove Selected Files’ option in the menu bar (or Del key) or clear the entire files list by using the ‘Clear Files List’ option in the menu bar (or Ctrl+L).

After you have added the desired files to the list, select some or all of them and click the Clock icon in the menu bar (or press F6) to open the ‘Change file time / attributes’ window as shown below:

BulkFileChanger

Tick the relevant Created/Modified/Accessed date and/or time box(es) and change the values as required. Or use the Add boxes to add/subtract a set number of hours/days etc from the existing date/time – e.g. if you want to subtract a week but aren’t bothered about changing the time.

If ‘Date/time sequence mode’ is turned on, BulkFileChanger will set a different date/time value for every file – the ‘Add’ field will be used to add additional time intervals for each file e.g. if you set the add value to 1 second, the modified time of the second file will be set to 1 second after the modified time of the first file, and so on…

Tip: the ‘Copy Time From… To’ option does what it says but is particularly useful for photos as you can choose to copy from an EXIF time stored within the photo itself (EXIF Generated is the time the photo was taken) to the file created time.

When you have finished selecting options, click the ‘Do It’ button to process the changes – the main list window will show the new file time(s). Close the program or clear the list and add more files.

Conclusion

BulkFileChanger is an excellent free and portable utility which requires no installation or extra files to work.

It is a quick and simple way to change date of creation of files individually or in batches – it also has useful extra features to change file attributes and the date modified or accessed.