I want to set the created date on some old scanned pictures to a date in 1970. If I do that using a third party tool, Windows explorer displays the date as blank. I thought NTFS could go back to the 1600s some time. What is going on?
Windows – the range of dates that windows explorer can display
ntfstimestampwindows-explorer
Best Answer
Quick analysis
When browsing folders, Windows Explorer won't display dates outside a specific range:
This can be confirmed by manually setting the date:
My assumption is that this behavior is related to backward compatibility. When NTFS didn't exist, the created, modified, and access dates were designed to take 16 bits each (2 bytes). The information gets packed like this:
To save bits, the year isn't stored as a whole number; an offset is used instead. Since there are 7 bits, that means
2^7 = 128
possible values, i.e. 1980-2107.As for NTFS, this is what the documentation says:
Further reading
Workaround
In certain cases you might be able to bypass this issue through EXIF tags:
The file properties dialog can display any date supported by the underlying file system:
Same goes with the command-line interface when using the
dir
command:Third-party programs such as 7-Zip might also be unaffected: