PHP: How to Get File Creation Date

PHP: how can I get file creation date?

Use filectime. For Windows it will return the creation time, and for Unix the change time which is the best you can get because on Unix there is no creation time (in most filesystems).

Note also that in some Unix texts the
ctime of a file is referred to as
being the creation time of the file.
This is wrong. There is no creation
time for Unix files in most Unix
filesystems.

How to know the creation time of a file by PHP?

filectime() will do it but if you are using windows you can get creation time but if you are using UNIX you can get the change time and that would be all.

Getting the system date created of a file using PHP

SOLUTION:

Because you're uploading a file the date on the system is going to be the upload date. Your solution if it is an image file is to read the image file meta-data, which is a bit of a pain because there are multiple types of meta data for each type of image file and finding the one you want is not in itself efficient.

I think Imagick PHP plugin does this but I can't vouch for the quality or worth of this/these functions.

To clarify further:

When you upload a file from a computer to a server, the server will hold NO filesystem information about the file on the computer.

Meta Data is data about something, and typically data about a file (such as its created date) is not stored within the file itself as a standard, but in the operatng system that stores the file contents.

The server which recieves your uploaded file can not tell you when the file was saved on to the computer it came from, or anything else filesystem related because the server has only been given the file contents data, not the file systems metadata about storage and modification (etc).

If this information is available from within a file, it is stored in what is called "MetaData" inside the file itself, and to reach these bits of metadata you need to use something like Imagick for images .

Alternatively, if you simply want the date the file was added to this system you can read that in this Stack Answer.

NOTES:

You want filectime.
After you header add an exit to cease execution.
You have a $_POST and a $_FILES value with the same name, you are using $_POST['upload_file'] and $_FILES['upload_file'] I'm not sure if this will break your script but the POST values of this will be empty unless you have another field in your form with the same name which is clearly bad practise.
Your require and/or include do not need to be in brackets.
It is also bad practise for pathinfo to be given a relative path, you should as much as possible give PHP functions absolute paths, using $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] or other magical constants.
Remove basename in filectime, it's unneed.
it looks like $path.$name should infact be $path.$name.$ext when using move_uploaded_file

Your problem (from your comment) is that you are looking for the time of a string that is not the file. Replace $_FILES["image_file"]["name"] in you filectime call to instead be ['tmp_name'] because this is the location address of where the uploaded file is (temporarily) stored.

The name array value in $_FILES simply tells you the name of the file from the place it was uploaded from.

BUT This time will simply only tell you the uploaded time.

Your Error log should have shown you that your filectime is tying to get the data from a non-file entity.

Is there a way to read the actual file creation date with PHP?

When a user uploads a file in a web browser, what actually happens is that three pieces of information are added to the form submission data:

A filename (which a browser will base on the name it had on the user's system)
A file type (which will be the browser's best guess, usually just based on the filename)
The binary contents of the file

Even if both the user's computer and your server have somewhere to record the creation date of the file, this won't be transmitted with the upload.

There's also something very important thing to bear in mind when building any web-based system: you only have the information the user gives you, and that information could be deliberately or accidentally wrong. If there was a timestamp, it might be wrong because the user's clock is wrong; or it might have been sent by a piece of software that let the user manually set it.

PHP: How to get creation date from uploaded file?

That data is not sent by the browser, so there's no way to access it. The data sent along with the file is mime-type, filename and file contents.

If you want the creation date, you'll either need the user to provide it or create a special file uploading mechanism via Flash or Java.

Get file creation date for filename for each file rather than for 1 file only?

Replace the whole foreach loop with this.

for ($i = 1; $i <= 12; $i++) {
    if (file_exists($items[$i])) {
        echo "</tr>";
        echo "<td><font face='Arial' size='3'>$i</font></td>";
        echo "<td><font face='Arial' size='3' color='red'>" . date("F d Y H:i", filemtime($items[$i]));
        echo "</font></td>";
    }
    print("

           <td><img src='$dirs[0]/$cam1[$i]' height='80' width='80'></td>
           <td><img src='$dirs[1]/$cam2[$i]' height='80' width='80'></td>
           <td><img src='$dirs[2]/$cam3[$i]' height='80' width='80'></td>

   ");
   if ($i === 12) break; //unnecessary should/could be removed
 }

Replaced $filename with $items[$i]

How do I get how long the file was created in seconds in PHP

From: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.filectime.php

You can use the filectime function to get the creation date of your file. The function returns a unix timestamp. You could then subtract that time from the current time to get the amount of seconds ago the file was made.

<?php

# Get the creation date of the file in unix timestamp
$creationDate = filectime("myfile.txt");

# Subtract the creation date from the current time, to get the time difference in seconds
$secondsAgo = time() - $creationDate;

?>

Please note that on most unix systems it will return the last modified date instead of the creation date. This is because on most unix systems the creation date does not exist like on windows.