Comment 53 for bug 215499

I'll need some help getting this to the right group but it seems there is a larger problem here.

People have reported a "bug" or "feature" in that Nautilus was not preserving timestamps, in particular, the file modification date, when doing file copies. I see the comments that this has been fixed and I can confirm that in Nautilus I can copy a file from one folder to another and the modification dates are preserved but ... and this is where it gets sticky ... I can see that other are having troubles with camera import and I've noticed that this same loss of modification timestamp is happening when I copy an image from Firefox to a folder or to the Desktop. Does Nautilus handle copies from applications to the Desktop as well?

In 7.10 and previous and only where I could drag and drop an image from Firefox to a folder, the timestamp was also preserved and that behavior has changed as well in 8.04.

You may not consider this important but it says to me that something has changed deeper down than just Nautilus. You've changed Nautilus to preserve timestamps but the behavior continues with other applications and I doubt that each of these other applications have each decided to not preserve the modification date timestamp on their own at the same time. Unless, Nautilus is managing all these copies and the patch to preserve timestamps has only been written to correct the problem when copying between folders.

There are a few of us who use these timestamps to help keep order in our collections of images and when I moved to Ubuntu and found these were preserved in so many cases, it was like a Godsend. Please do find where this "bug" or "feature" can be correctly moved to preserve the dates across the applications.

Many Thanks.