Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

That's because you did not modify (edit) the file itself, you just copied/moved it.

rgrenaderphoto Loc: Hollywood, CA

Get Lightroom. The cataloging and organizational capabilities are worth the price of admission.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I edited a file from a couple of years ago, and when I moved it, all the dates changed to today.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Did date taken change also? It should not have.
Date created and date modified should have changed because you created a modified version today.
(I don't like the way Microsoft handles "created" date.)
Copy an entire directory to another drive (or location) and the created date for each will become the date you copied the files.)

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Everything changed to today's date. I'm glad I found that File Date Corrector program. It can set a whole directory of files back to their original creation date. It's just $20.

AllenDpics Loc: Williamsburg Virginia

Thanks everyone for your replies and suggestions. Here is what I have done based on some of your suggestions.
Before I posted this topic I created a file tree with Photos/Pics/Year/Month/Day. This will eventually be backed up to multiple drives.
Using File explorer I went to view....details....added a 'date taken' column. That is all I needed. (Thanks Morning Star)
I was able to cut and past all files to their respective dates. So far I have not had any problems except getting tired. Thanks everyone. It will take some time, but I'll geterdone:-)
You guys are great:-)
Allen

markngolf Loc: Bridgewater, NJ

Download FastStone Image Viewer(free). http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDownload.htm. It is a browser and also does simple post processing. When an image is selected, from the top menu/View/Image Properties(Exif). I think this is what you want. If I'm wrong, there will be many replies that will indicate that I am.
Mark

advocate1982

Lightroom would make simple work of this. In addition it would allow you to keyword files for other data such as location, who or what is in the photo, etc. In addition, if you don't want to play with moving the files, it allows you to search your entire catalog by specific date, and it doesn't matter where the particular file is stored.

rmalarz Loc: Tempe, Arizona

Allen, I've been using this software.

http://www.br-software.com/extracter.html

It outputs a csv file which can be imported into Excel.

I use a similar method of storing images. The directories are chronological, YYYYMMDD, the files are stored within those directories as CameraCode-YYYYMMDD--RollNumber-ImageNumber. Since the exif data needs to be read from a jpg image, I let PS extract the jpg at a suitable size to be used as a thumbnail. I extract the exif data from those thumbnails and input them into an Excel spreadsheet. The thumbnails are then moved to a server on which runs a database. The Excel information is exported to tables in the database.

The search and sort application searches through that database and then presents the images whose associated data matches the search and sort criteria. The software mentioned facilitates the extraction of all the information I need to proceed from there.
--Bob