Using Date Added In the Mac Finder

Learn about Date Added, a date property of files in the Mac Finder that is rarely talked about, but can be useful.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost. Let me tell you about the Date Added File Property.
So when using the Finder to manage your files sometimes you want to Sort or Search for files based on their date. But what date do you mean exactly? There is, of course, the date created for a file. There's also the date last modified and the date last opened. But there is a fourth date that can be pretty useful but we rarely talk about it. It's called Date Added. 
When in the Finder here let's go to List View. List View gives you columns with different file attributes. Typically you'll see Name and then Date Modified. This is the primary date that people deal with. It was the last time you made a change to the file. If the file is brand new Date Created and Date Modified will be the same thing. But as you work with the file Date Created stays the same and Date Modified will change over time as you make changes to the file. If you select a file, like this one, and Get Info on it by going to File and then Get Info or just Command i, you'll see in here under More Info all three of these dates. You'll see Date the file was created, you'll see the Date it was last modified, and also the Date it was last opened. But you won't see this fourth date, Date Added. 
The main place you see this Date is not here in a typical folder in the Finder. But if you go to your Downloads Folder. I've got the default settings here so Downloads Folder is here in the Dock and I can easily open it up. But I can also have gone to Downloads in the left sidebar, if you see it there, or you can go to Downloads in the menu. When you see your Downloads here you will see Date Added. The Downloads folder, by default, has Date Added as a column instead of Date Modified. This makes sense because you want to know when you downloaded these files and Date Added will tell you that. In addition it will even automatically sort with the most recently downloaded file at the top. So you could reverse that, like this, or sort by name, if you like. You can always change the sort by clicking on the Headers here in List View. 
In addition you can also show Date Added in a normal Finder window like this. You can either Control Click, two-finger click on a trackpad, or right click on a mouse on any of these Header columns and then select Date Added here. Or you can go to View, Show View Options, or Command J and you can check Date Added there. It adds this column. So I still see Date Modified here but I also have Date Added. I can even drag this to the left if I want. 
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But wait a minute! What is Date Added then? It makes sense in the Downloads Folder, that's the date that the file was downloaded. That it was added to your Downloads Folder. What does it mean when it is just one of your regular folders in your Documents Folder. Well a better way to think of this attribute is instead of Date Added think of it as Date Last Moved. So, when the file is moved into this folder. It could have been in another folder that you had. You could have created this file and then moved it into this folder and the Date Added attribute will reflect the time when you moved the file there. So let's test this out by going up one level here. There are all the files here in this folder. Let's look at another folder here, this one, and let's say I move one of these files into this folder. So first let's add the Date Added column here. We'll move it here to the left so we can focus on it. We can see here that this document has September 5, 2023 and if I were to move it into this folder it moves and notice Date Added changes to right now. Date Modified stays the same. So does Date Created and Date Last Opened. But, the Date Added changes. Now I let the clock advance by one minute here so if now I were to move it back into this folder you could see it still maintains the Date that it was last moved. So now 11:06 as opposed to 11:05. 
Note that Undo won't change this. If I do Edit, Undo or just Command Z, it goes back here but it keeps the same Date Added. So you won't be able to get back the old date once you've moved the file. 
Now the only real way to see the Date Added in the Finder is to use List View and have Date Added as a column. But you can actually use Date Added in some other cases. For instance, if I go to Icon View and I go to View and Sort By notice I can Sort By, Date Added. So I can at least see the order in which files were added to this folder. I can also use Groups and then with Groups on I can Group By date added. So I can see when files were added to the folder like that. This also will work in Column View as well. 
Now you can also Search for files using Date Added. So let's go up a level here to the Documents folder and start our Search right here. If I were to start a search using Command F I have the Search Field that I can enter but also the search criteria here set to Kind If Any. I can change that and choose Other and then from Other I can search for Added and find Date Added. I can add it to that main menu there or just use it this one time. I can set Date Added Is, and say within the last ten days. This will find everything in my Documents folder that has a Date Added date in the last ten days. In other words files that have been moved recently. I can expand this and say a hundred days and I can see all of the different files moved in the last hundred days. I'm still not going to see it here in the columns. But I can easily add it and then Sort By that so I can see the most recently moved files and only be looking at the ones within the last hundred days. You can also do an exact date, today, after a certain date, this week, all of that. So you have lots of different options for doing searches like this. 
You can also create a Saved Search, also known as a Smart Folder, by simply clicking right here and then you can name it something appropriate, like that if you like. So you can always go to this Saved Search. I can add it to the sidebar or I can just place it somewhere like in a folder on my Desktop or something like that and instantly access this search again. So I can always see which files have been grouped around most recently. In this case it's just in my Documents Folder which is really useful because the Downloads Folder is not in the Document Folder. So I'm not going to get a bunch of downloads in here. I'll just get files that I moved into the Documents Folder or around inside the Documents Folder in this search results.
There are many uses for this of course. For instance you may be looking for files and have no idea when the last time you opened them or modified them or even when they were created because maybe they were given to you by somebody else. But you may remember when you put them all into a folder or moved them all to their proper places maybe on a certain date or in a date range. So you could do a search for that date as the Date Added date rather than trying to search by Date Modified, Date Created, or Date Opened. 
Here's one last tip. If you really want to find out the date added of a file without using the List View in the Finder, while you can't do it in the Info window or any other way in the Finder you can actually do it in the Terminal. So all you need to do in the Terminal is use mdls, which will look up attributes or files, and the attribute name that you want to look for is kMDItemDateAdded. It has to be capitalized like that with the MD and then the I D and A all uppercase. Then you just need to put the path to the file. Easy way to do that, of course, is to just drag and drop. So I can drag this file here like that and then Return and I will get in the Terminal Window here the Date Added. You can see it matches this date right here although of course the time zone is going to be gmt. If you really wanted to you could build this Terminal Command into a shortcut or something if you need easy access to the Date Added for a selected file. 
So, I hope you learned something new about your files in the Mac Finder. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 3 Responses to “Using Date Added In the Mac Finder”

Sheldon

5 months ago

Thanks bunches

Thomas

Please explain how you can have a Date Added of Sep 25, 2023, with a Date Modified of Feb 9, 2021. That's confusing where multiple files has a date modified before the date added (-6.09 time mark).

Gary Rosenzweig

Thomas: Watch the video as I explain what "Date Added" means and you'll understand.