Losing creation date of attached images on export

davewhughes

When I export and create a separate media folder, the image files lose their original creation date and take on the date that they were exported. This means that you can not use these images and have them sort properly when mixed with images from other sources as the creation dates are now have been lost and now incorrect.
While the exports go into folders with dates, the images themselves do not reflect the time and date taken.

Ideally on exporting Diarium would preserve the original date that the image was taken/created rather than when Diarium exported it.

Diarium version: ipad 2.9.53
OS + version: IOS 16.2

timo

It's debatable if that media file in the zip archive was created the date on which it was added to the entry in Diarium or if it was created when the zip archive was created. The "original" creation date of the file (e.g. the time when you actually shot the photo) is lost the moment you attach the file to Diarium, so it cannot be used while exporting. Diarium only stores the file contents, name & extension. In theory, the app could attempt to extract the "original creation" date/time if it is stored in the file name but I am not planning to get into that.
When exporting, Diarium stores the files in folders that contain the timestamp of the corresponding entry, so you can still see that date. Would there be any benefit for you if the files themselves have their "write" date set to the date of the corresponding diary entry? I would be able to do that.
Also, would there be some benefit if the ".docx", ".txt", ".html" files themselves would have the date of the entry rather the export date as their "creation date" when using the "separate file per date" option?

timo

Next update will set the file date in the ZIP to the journal entry date.

davewhughes

Yes that would help a lot by setting the creation date to the folder date that they are stored in. The only issue there is that they would still be in the wrong order potentially because the time would be lost I presume. However it is a lot better then the current state where all photos are deemed to be have taken on the same date and time ie the time they were exported.
The issue has arisen because I effectively used Diarium as my photo organiser and I figured I could just export them all at the end of my trip (7 weeks in NZ!) and then merge them with the remainder of the other images that were not included in the diary. However they were all out of sort order due to the creation date being lost.

Thanks for looking into this.

timo

Wow, 7 weeks in NZ sounds amazing!
Just one small info: Diarium compresses the attached pictures so they are much smaller than the original, so the app won't fully replace any photo organizer tool 😉

davewhughes

Yes, I appreciate that. In some ways this is an advantage for a large image collection.
Any of the really key shots I would have hi res backups of, but for all the holiday pics, reduced res is good.

I just had a further thought on this on how to solve the ordering issue on the day. If the image names were prefixed by the order they appear in the diary entry, (eg 1_image name) then they would sort by date and then name. This would ensure that the order in the diary entries was preserved if all images for a day had the same date and time.

NZ was awesome and I dutifully filled in my Diarium diary daily to preserve the trip. Now I am trying to rationalise all the images into a single folder in the correct order. I am merging images from Diarium with 2 cameras and also images I have processed to improve. It is a bit if a headache to be honest.