Two things that are mostly unrelated, but still a little related.

First, hit a nice milestone for the War Within and picked up the Ahead of the Curve achievement for the current season. The guild I’m in isn’t super hard core, so we’re usually a little slow to hit this – and the final boss of the raid was a real road block for us and made it even slower. We raid for 3 hours twice a week, and the last four weeks have been spent clearing the first seven bosses of the raid in the first hour to hour and a half of that and then spending the remaining time beating our heads into the final wall. We finally managed to clear her on the day after Thanksgiving, with 10 guild members and one shaman we picked out of Group Finder as we didn’t have 10 to start. He was a serious trooper and stuck with us through many, many wipes so thumbs up to our random shaman friend.

We’ll presumably keep clearing her for the rest of the season, but now at least we can skip several of the earlier bosses that we were only still doing because it was something to do that wasn’t bordering on self harm.

The other thing that I wanted to talk about is how the macOS Photos program handles importing image files, because recently I have been playing WoW on a PC rather than a Mac, and also playing a lot of other stuff on the PC, and this means that I have been generating a lot of screenshots on the PC. This has come with a host of issues.

The first is HDR. Taking a screenshot (alt+Prt Scrn) of any game that Windows is forcing into HDR mode gives me a horribly washed-out image. Taking a “capture” (Win+Alt+Prt Scrn) gives me a .png and a .jxr file, and while I usually can’t do much with the .jxr file at least it gives me a .png that usually looks pretty good.

UNLESS, and this is something I just discovered, UNLESS the game itself natively supports HDR. If this is the case, then anything captured with the “Capture” hotkey is really painfully dark and anything that’s captured with alt+Prt Scrn looks fine. This is why there’s only one screenshot on my earlier post about Guardians of the Galaxy, as an aside. I’m quite annoyed by this because the game is a real looker and I took a bunch of shots while I was playing it.

But, that’s only one of the issues. The other is that the easiest way for me to get the screenshots from my PC over to my Mac is to use OneDrive, and I’ve just recently discovered that this messes up the timestamps in a way that’s quite annoying.

When the files are downloaded from OneDrive to my Mac, they keep their time and date stamps… but when they are imported into Photos they get a new time and date stamp that reflects the time and date they were downloaded to the Mac from OneDrive, and I couldn’t figure out why for a while.

It turned out that macOS keeps track of a “Created” time stamp and a “Modified” time stamp, and “Modified” is what shows up in Finder while “Created” is what Photos uses when importing. When the files are downloaded to the Mac, the Created time and date are set to the time they hit the file system.

So I had to make a script to make the two match, which I will share here in case anyone else runs into similar:

for filename in *.*
do	
	modifiedtime=$(stat -f %m "$filename")
	touchtime=$(date -j -r $modifiedtime +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S)
	touch -d $touchtime "$filename"
done

My usual caveats here: This works for me and may not work for you. If it doesn’t work for you, and even if it does absolutely horrible things to your data, I’m not responsible.