Godfrey DiGiorgi mused: > > You're quite right, Mac OS is not the culprit at all. Image files on a > card written by the DS do not have the "Created" date field in the FAT > file directory filled out. . .
(Warning: Non-tech-heads might want to bale out now). Actually, Mac OS *is* the culprit. It doesn't support FAT correctly. (I'm including the file browser as part of the software in Mac OS) The FAT specifications explicitly state that the "Created" date field is an optional field. If you don't supply a value, you must leave the field zero. This is exactly what the file system on the CF card does. Windows checks for the zero value, and elects to display the modification date (aka the Last Write date), which is the only mandatory date field. (I haven't actually checked to see whether the substitution is done in Windows Explorer, or within the kernel. I suspect the latter). When the Mac kernel is asked for information about the FAT volume, it looks as though it recognises the special case of zero, and doesn't translate a zero date offset from the FAT epoch to the Mac epoch. But the Mac file browser doesn't seem to be prepared to handle this case, and simply formats a zero value as the day before time began. Photoshop on the Mac obviously recognises the zero, but displays "--"
