Setting up time and date in a camera

[Axon]

Last summer I bought a nikon coolpix s6300 digital camera. I took many photos and videos (10 GB in size). At the beginning I didn't know how to set the right date and time, so all the photos and videos were set in the external sd card at 1/1/2012, I think this was the default time and date in case you didn't change it. After a while a friend of mine did the job for me and he set the right date and time. Now I have many videos and photos that are dated at 1/1/2012, which were taking properly on May and June.


Is there a way to retrieve the correct time and date for all the photos and videos that were taken before it was changed? I know this might look impossible because I think this is somehow embedded in the hardware on the camera. But there might be hope.

[geXXos]

No man, is not possible, ok.

[Kulverstukas]

No it is not possible, because that wrong date is set through the image, filename and exif data. There is one thing you could rely on - file modification time. That is when the image was modified in any way and that is always set to the date it was created, however creation date gets rewritten with every move or copy and modification time stays the same until you actually modify that image (should be like that).
So if I were you I'd check that and write a small script to extract the modification time and put it ib a file name.

[xC]

If the creation date has not been modified as Kulver said in Windows you could retrieve them individually into a buffer using GetFileAttributesEx() and then write the original creation date using SetFileTime(), as well as making a function to timestamp the files as well.

Edit: Oh, but that won't change the timestamp on the actual photo.