What do the Created, Accessed, and Modified tags in the "Properties" pane of an image file mean? Are they when the file was saved to the computer or when it was created wherever it was saved from, etc?
Thanks is advance.
1 Answer
The answer to the question you ask is more complicated than I think you expect.
- Creation Time: The time the file was created on a filesystem.
- Modified Time: The time that this instance of the file was last changed
- Accessed Time: The approximate time the file was last read.
All of these values are stored in the filesystem, so the filesystem "writes the rules" as it were, for how these metrics are created and maintained.
For instance the FAT uses local time, whereas NTFS uses UTC, so FAT can cause oddities based on timezone and Daylight savings time. The precision of the values also varies by Filesytsem type. More info Here:
So the crux of your question (when does Creation Time refer to), is complicated, and based on when the data last became a file. A file transfered from one location to another, either locally or over the network (or from removable media), was a file from the beginning, so if you copy it locally, the Creation Date is sent with it, and does not change.
If you download that file over the web however, it is transmitted as a binary stream of content, and written to a brand new file on the local system, so it will have the time of download as its creation time.
Zip archives blur this line though, because a zip/tar contains files with their metadata, so if you download a zip, the .zip file will have a creation date of today, but the files inside the zip file will predate the archives creation, perhaps by years, and those creation dates stick to the files when the archive is extracted to the local disk.
So the answer to your question is, it depends on how you got the data that is in the file, and the last time it became a file from your systems perspective.
