Skip to Content
Sindre Sorhus
Back to Actions

Updated

How to Change the Creation and Modification Date of a File on Mac

With Actions

  1. Install Actions, and open it once.
  2. In the Shortcuts app, click the add button to make a new shortcut.
  3. Add the “Set Creation and Modification Date of File” action of Actions.
  4. In the action, click the file field, and choose the file.
  5. Click “Creation and Modification Date” to choose which date to set: “Creation Date”, “Modification Date”, or both.
  6. Click the date field, and set the date and the time.
  7. Click the arrow in the action to show more options, and turn on “Modify Original”. Without it, the action changes only a copy inside the shortcut.
  8. Run the shortcut.

“Modify Original” only works when you choose the file directly in the action, not when the file comes from another action. For a file in iCloud Drive, the modification date may not stay, as iCloud changes it when it syncs.

For a photo or a video, the date that the Photos app shows is the capture date inside the file, not the file date. Use the “Set Image/Video Capture Date” action of Actions for it.

Get Actions

Additional actions for the Shortcuts app

Download on the App Store

Free

Platforms
macOS, iOS, visionOS
Requires
macOS, iOS, or visionOS 26 or later
Category
Utilities
Released
October 2021
Privacy
No personal data collected
Updated
June 2026
Version
4.2.0
Size
29 MB
US App Store rating
4.8/5 (529 ratings)

More about Actions

Without an app

Open the Terminal app, and run touch with the date as year, month, day, hour, and minute. This sets the modification date to 1 January 2020 at 12:00:

console
touch -t 202001011200 ~/Desktop/file.txt

When the new date is before the creation date, macOS moves the creation date back to it too. So touch can set both dates to a date in the past, but it cannot set only the creation date, or set the creation date to a later date.

To see the dates, select the file in Finder, and press CommandI. touch is enough when you only move the dates back. The action can set the creation date, the modification date, or both, also to a later date.

More Guides