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GeorgeTFilm
GeorgeTFilm
Participant
May 11, 2026
Answered

How to change the Creation Date/Date Created for media in Adobe Creative Cloud/CC?

  • May 11, 2026
  • 3 replies
  • 24 views

I have footage shot across 2 phones and a GoPro.

When going abroad, the filenames are labelled according to local time, but the ‘Creation Date’ saves according to my home’s time (London, BST). For example: filming at 16:35 in Germany creates a file called “20260426_163508.mp4” with the Creation Date 26/04/2026 15:32 …
This, however, does not happen with the GoPro, which saves the files according to local time (in this example, 16:35)

So the goal is: I want to change all the ‘Created/Capture’ times from phone media by 1 hour, so I can sort and filter everything chronologically in Premiere.
I cannot sort/filter by filename, because GoPros save with a different naming convention unrelated to DDMMYYYY_HHMMSS

I tried using Adobe Bridge – firstly, the time there is off by another hour for some reason (now 14:35) so that’s weird. Now I try to to shift the Date Created by 2 hours. It then looks correct (the Date Created matches the filename) in Bridge, but this then not updated in Premiere Pro:

In PP I have Offline/Re-linked the media, I completely deleted from Project and re-imported, and of course restarted everything. “20260426_163508.mp4” still has the Creation Date 26/04/2026 15:35.

THEN, when I right click>File Info in Bridge, I see that ‘Creation Date’ is still incorrectly 15:35.

Meaning that (1) there are two different things: Date Created and Creation Date, (2) I can only edit one of these in Bridge, and (3) the one I can edit is not the one that is pulled through by Premiere Pro.

Why is this? Is there a way to do this? Bridge? Premiere? Media Encoder?

 

Correct answer Kevin-Monahan

Hi George,

Thanks for the question. I do understand your issue and have come across similar issues with my own travel video projects. I believe Premiere is reading the embedded media metadata rather than the file system “Date Created,” which is why the changes in Bridge are probably not carrying over.


I haven’t personally tried this workflow, but I’ve heard good things about a free utility called ExifTool (https://adobe.ly/4tDAh1m) for shifting embedded metadata timestamps in bulk. It may be worth testing on a few copied clips to see whether Premiere then sorts everything correctly by capture time.

If you do try it, definitely let us know how it goes and whether it solves the issue for you. I hope it works for you!


Thanks,
Kevin

3 replies

Stan Jones
Community Expert
Stan JonesCommunity Expert
Community Expert
May 12, 2026

​@GeorgeTFilm,

 

Part of the HARD part is what you have sorted: which camera with which format produces what actual time relative you the one you want to use.

 

Then you have to determine how to get what you want in the filename or some common metadata field that PR will use. In my situation, I was shooting in Africa with an iPhone 15 Pro Max and a Panasonic GH7. And once again I forgot to figure out ahead what in-camera options I might have. My summary of fixes looked like this:

 

DNG to PNG uses CreateDate
RW2 to PNG uses CreateDate, but time is US without daylight savings (zone -4, 6 hours)
JPG GH7 uses SubSecCreateDate
MOV GH7 uses SubSecCreateDate with GlobalTimeShift
MOV iPhone uses CreationDate
Exception: 2 jpg's use SubSecDateTimeOriginal

 

A few somewhat random comments that might help.

 

Those are the “tag names.” You’ll often see the “description” instead of the actual name. So when run with -s you get the tag name, e.g. SubSecCreateDate, and without it, you get description, Create Date. But the description Create Date is also found for the Tag CreateDate. CreateDate in my sample is 2024:11:03 10:39:04. SubSecCreateDate is 2024:11:03 10:39:04.341+02:00, including a millisecond (to differentiate burst shooting) and an explicit offset.

 

I did some study and a lot of trial and error. My test command would not actually rename a file. For example, one of the commands was:

exiftool "-testname<$SubSecCreateDate %f.%e" -GlobalTimeShift 6 -d "%Y%m%d %H%M%S-%-3f" *.*

 

That command to actually rename the files was:

exiftool "-filename<$SubSecCreateDate %f.%e" -GlobalTimeShift 6 -d "%Y%m%d %H%M%S-%-3f" *.*

 

A primary resource is the exiftool documentation:

https://exiftool.org/exiftool_pod.html

 

Stan

 

 

 

 

 

Stan Jones
Community Expert
Stan JonesCommunity Expert
Community Expert
May 12, 2026

​@GeorgeTFilm,

 

I’ve used this extensively for just the reasons you list. I’ll look for my last notes. Depending on device and filetype, there were different fields to be used. And there are short and long designators that can make this very confusing.

 

I think there may be GUI options available, but I have not pursued them.

 

Stan

 

K
Community Manager
Kevin-MonahanCommunity ManagerCorrect answer
Community Manager
May 11, 2026

Hi George,

Thanks for the question. I do understand your issue and have come across similar issues with my own travel video projects. I believe Premiere is reading the embedded media metadata rather than the file system “Date Created,” which is why the changes in Bridge are probably not carrying over.


I haven’t personally tried this workflow, but I’ve heard good things about a free utility called ExifTool (https://adobe.ly/4tDAh1m) for shifting embedded metadata timestamps in bulk. It may be worth testing on a few copied clips to see whether Premiere then sorts everything correctly by capture time.

If you do try it, definitely let us know how it goes and whether it solves the issue for you. I hope it works for you!


Thanks,
Kevin

GeorgeTFilm
GeorgeTFilmAuthor
Participant
May 12, 2026

Thanks Kevin. Yes – I’ve asked around and I think all signs are pointing towards ExifTool. I’m surprised there isn’t something more accessible than a command-line application to do this, it’s a bit outside my comfort zone. But needs must!

-----

I tested it with some copied files as you suggested and it indeed worked: the ‘Creation Date’ for those files matches the filename when imported into Premiere. Feels a bit daunting to have all my files modified by the tool, and another downside to doing it this way is needing extra duplicates of the pre-and-post-Exif media. 

For anyone reading this in the future, I want to shout out “A Better Finder Attributes.” While I couldn’t work out how to modify the specific field I needed with it (maybe it’s possible!), it is a powerful tool regardless and I plan on keeping it for system-level metadata handling.

-----

TLDR: ExifTool is the solution, but requires a bit of legwork and extra duplicates for safety.
A Better Finder Attributes might be a solution for similar problems. 

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