Timestamps were nuked by android, then synced by syncthing

Hey, so I have a problem which I suppose is more the fault of android than syncthing:

After installing a SD card into my phone, and letting Android migrate all my data across, apparently Android nuked all the timestamps of my photos and videos and has set them to the time of the move. Which is a pain in the ass, but clearly not syncthing’s fault.

But, after this, I go to my computer and find that syncthing has - I suppose correctly - updated all my photos and videos to these new, incorrect, timestamps. And now all my files are displaying in a jumbled order.

I also expected that the previous versions of these files with correct timestamps would be in the stfolder as I had trash can versioning enabled but apparently they aren’t. (Is this not to be expected???)

So my question… is there a way to get Syncthing to ignore file timestamps and only sync genuinely new files so this doesn’t happen to me again?

(I basically want nothing to ever, ever, be overwritten or deleted. I already have ignore deletes set. If there is any conflict it should just skip the file)

Since the content of the file did not change, but only its metadata (timestamps), there would not be much sense in creating a copy of the data.

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well, nevertheless, meta data is important, to me at least, and has been lost. I’d rather have unnecessary copies than lose meta data

photos usually have exif data with information about camera, when photo was taken, geolocation, etc. - maybe you can use it to restore file timestamps.

There is not.

Thanks for the answers. I hope one day syncthing might have this feature, as it is pretty much the only reliable data-transfer-over-wifi tool I’ve found.

Workaround: Let syncthing do such data migrations :wink:

And as @uok said, for pics/videos the date you probably really care about isn’t the modification date, but the date the picture was taken which is stored in the files. Any decent application will sort pics based on that and if you wanted to, you could set modification date to that as well (check exiftools).

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