What Is The Create Date Of A File?
create-date
When checking the information given in a file, you will often find something called the Create Date. Find out all you need to know about this value and what it tells you about your file.
The Create Date is the date the file was created: the moment a camera wrote a photo, a recording started, or a document was first saved. It is stored inside the file, so it does not change when you copy, move or rename it.
Which files carry it, and where the value comes from
Photos and raw camera files, video and audio files, PDFs and office documents all carry a version of this field. The value is set by whatever made the file - a camera, a phone, a scanner, a recorder, or the application that exported it - and it is taken from that device's own clock. It is usually displayed in the date format used by that machine.
It is not the date your computer shows next to the file in a folder. That one belongs to the file system, and it is rewritten whenever the file is copied, downloaded or unpacked, which is why a photo from years ago can appear to be from today. The Create Date inside the file is the one that stays put.
Two neighbouring fields are worth telling apart. The modification date always holds the last time the file was changed and moves every time it is saved, while the Create Date stays the same. Date/Time Original, in a photo, is the moment the shutter opened. For a picture straight out of a camera it and the Create Date are often the same second; they part company when something is scanned or re-digitised later, or exported again from an editor.
What the value looks like
Normally a date followed by a time, for example 2019:08:14 17:03:22. The colons in the date half are not a mistake: that is how EXIF, the metadata standard cameras use, writes dates. Other formats use dashes instead, and in some files the time of creation is stated in a separate row of its own rather than alongside the date.
Most of the time there is no time zone attached, so the value is simply the local clock reading of the device that wrote it. Video is the exception people trip over: in MP4 and MOV files the creation time is meant to be stored in UTC, which is why a clip can appear several hours away from the time you remember filming it. And a wrong value is not evidence of tampering - a camera with an unset clock or a flat backup battery will stamp a confidently wrong date on every file it makes.
Why it matters
It is the field photo libraries, music players and file managers sort and group by, so one wrong value is enough to bury a file in the middle of an archive. For anything you are keeping long term it is also the more trustworthy record of age, since it survives copying while the file system date does not.
It is a privacy field as well. It records when. Put a set of files together and the Create Dates alone sketch a timeline of what somebody was doing and when, and next to location or camera rows that timeline becomes much more specific. It is worth a look before files go anywhere public.