Have a deceased relative who was really into photography and took tons of digital images.
I was sent their iPhone (still active with a cellular plan) and an external HDD (Western Digital “MyCloud” networked HDD) that relatives believes holds the majority of decedent’s images.
I have the lock code for the iPhone so I can access it directly, but do NOT have the decedent’s icloud password, so I can’t access icloud outside of the phone.
I’m planning to copy the images from the iPhone and “MyCloud” HDD to 3 external portable SSD’s, one to send to each of two relatives and one as a backup:
So, questions:
1 - Is there a better method, generally, to do this other than copying all the images through my PC to SSD drives?
2 - Any applications/programs I should be considering to help do this?
3 - Any recommended methods for organizing photos on the SSD’s? I was planning to just organize with directory structure based on photo dates (Main folders - Years, sub-folders - Months) but would be cool if I could present them with something more easily searched/browsed.
4 - One relative has a Mac, other relative has a PC. Is there one format/organization I can use for the SSD’s that will allow them to be read by everyone?
Question, I’ve done that when copying photos from an old laptop to a new laptop. Copied them to a Passport type external drive, then copied them to the new HD on the new laptop.
Problem I experienced, when accessing the photos on the new laptop later, the “date” of the image became the date they were copied, not the original date they were taken. So searching for a photo by past date, was no longer possible.
Partially solved by actually putting into a directory structure: 2025[Folder]->June[Sub-Folder]->Image123456.jpg[Image file]
Can also be solved by looking at EXIF data that’s embedded in the image with some kind of application, but usually not just with directory viewing alone:
Right. I can look at the Details, to see date taken. But Windows Explorer uses the Date Created (which is the date it was copied), to organize the photos. So, how do you get Explorer to search using “Date Taken” in the Details, instead of Created, to organize/search photos?
Use ‘datetaken:’ in the seachbox. In File Explorer type:
datetaken:2026
datetaken:1/1/2025-1/1/2026
datetaken:July2026
datetaken:>=1/1/2025 (everything from that date forward)
You can search for a year, a range, a month, etc.
The first search may take a while. You can optimize for pictures in your indexing settings if you do a lot of this.
But I was thinking along the lines of the OP, if he copied photos to a portable HD, and gave it to his relatives. If they just plug the HD into their own computer, and use Windows Explorer to view the photos, they’ll be no easy way for them to find a picture taken at a certain point in time, as every photo will have the Copy date, in the normal Explorer window, not the Created date, right?.
I get what you are saying, if you give them unstructured files it will all look as if it was taken on 1 day. The only way around that would be to either sort them into folders Year\Month or rename the files to include the date taken before distributing. You could tell them about the ‘datetaken:’ but that may take some time.
If you are comfortable with scripting there are tools out there to help with bulk sorting or renaming like https://exiftool.org/ Run it against a copy, not the original files.
But again that will only work with files that have EXIF data (actual photos from a camera/phone)
When you copy a file (or even move it), a new file is created at the target with today’s creation date. This can be avoided using linux / Unix operating systems, or advanced windows cmd shells. Assuming you don’t use those, the easier way is to modify the creation date after you copy the files.
I can’t post links. Search for this in google:
“windows application which sets a copied file created date to the date the picture was taken”
These applications will read the “Date Taken” field in the copy, so you must ensure that field is present in the Original, copied over, and actually set correctly on the copy. You can see this using Windows Explorer, right click on the columns in Detail mode, select “Date Taken” field.
The “exiftool” command is available on most Linux shells, as well as advanced Windows Command shells that you down online. If you “know a computer guy” who has any advanced systems, they most likely would have this feature on their server.
You may choose to search for a Windows command shell, or simply a single app, that uses exiftool to set the copied file’s Creation Date to the Date Taken date.
Cool, thanks. It will require an extra step of first replicating all the files to the destination drive and THEN moving them into Year/Month folders. Holding onto the article though, I may do that.
So far my process is looking like:
1 - xcopy/robocopy all the files onto SSD to maintain source timestamps
2 - use exiftools to modify timestamps to mirror Exif data, if available
3 - Move files into directories by timestamp date (year/month)
The EXIF data was added to picture files around windows 98 / 2000. Before the JPEG standard was around, and widely used in cell phones, the fields were not present or blank.
I’ve done this myself a couple times. Phones like those old Nokias, they didn’t always set the JPEG fields on the picture files. I think around 2005 - 2010 is when all the phones started using it, guessing. You may find some old files simply do not have EXIF data, and you may need to use other fields instead.
Also, say you have 1000 pictures from around 2000 with no dates. Set 100 to Jan1, 200 to Feb, and so on ten times. So that at least “some reasonable” date will be preserved.
Or split them up by year, and set the whole year to Jan 1.
I may have missed if thus was mentioned, but you really should be using a media file management program for this. have a look at ACDSee and FreeFileSync. They are both excellent programs for this kind of thing, exactly what you need to locate, sort, organize, copy, move media files and even clone media drives. You can search for files by the meta data. Lets say you want to find every image taken from 2010 to 2012 and have them sorted by year, month, day or even the hour it was taken. These media management programs are a BILLION times better and easier than using explorer.
These programs can also copy the files and preserve the original file date. They also have a feature where if the file date is 11-22-2026 but the metadata says the photo was taken or scanned 04-23-2019, it will change the creation date to the actual date the photo was taken.
