Capture date just roughly known

[dieter268]

I have a bunch of scanned negatives and slides where I do not know a exact capture date and time (on some not even the day, just the year and month).
Create date if these scans is now of course the scan date but for the sake of chronology I want to change that.
What is best practice to deal with such images ?
If I know the image was taken on lets say August 1970, I was thinking to give it a date and time somehow in the middle of the month (maybe 15th of August, 12:00) so i can build a chronology with the next image at lets say 12:02).
If i know the image was taken in the morning or evening I can take 08:00 or 19:00, respectevly.

Any suggestions, better practices, critics ?

Thanks

Dieter
      

[Paul2660]

It sounds like you need to edit the exif data, I don't believe Capture One or LR will do this.  You will need a software tool like exiftool.  This is freeware for either mac or win. 

By itself exiftool is a command line interface on windows or terminal interface on mac.  If you are good with that, you might be able to accomplish what you wish without gui.  I am not and also downloaded the gui interface.  This makes it so much easier to work with, abet, you are not able to run a batch, at least I have not figured that out.  Command line interface does a better batch job.

This will let you change the date as you are attempting.

Paul Caldwel

[Rand47]

I think any consistent scheme will work for you.  You might want to select a "time stamp" that will be unique to the uncertain images.  E.g. 0801 or 1901 hours to indicate uncertainty as to actual capture time.

Rand

[dieter268]

Rand, very good point to have a indicator for those uncertain images.
I'm thinking to use a time range in the very early morning, at 02:00 or 03:00 I usually sleep then making photos ...
So such a early time would be a indicator of a uncertain image.

Paul, thank you, too.
I can set the capture time with LR, and I also have exiftool.

[Alan Klein]

Does you photo editing program allow you to increment files in a folder so that you wind up with something like this.  (name)-001, (name)-002, (name)-003.  You can make (name) anything such as the date 3-20-2014-001; 3-20-2014-002; etc. or Bahamas-001, Bahamas-002 etc.

You might try Irfanview.  Free photo editing program. They let you change the names of picture files in that way.

[john beardsworth]

Lightroom itself allows you to increment filenames. In the file renaming dialog it's known as "sequence number".

If you want to change the EXIF, my Capture Time to EXIF plugin was designed as an easy front end to Exiftools and specifically for changing the date of scans.

John

[Robert55]

I use geosetter (www.geosetter.de ) as a GUI for ExifTool. It is intended for adding GPS data to photo's, but it is not necessary to do that. It is reasonably easy to set up batch jobs with it. For me it works better than ExifToolGUI, but that may be because I use it more often.

As for a system, I think you should keep it simple. Do you really need individual timestamps, or is the order you can have in file numbers enough?

One suggestion: I'd take the first day of the month, or the quarter if yuo only know the season. Countries where birthdays are not recorded, do something like that: half the pouplation has January 1 in his/her passport and if your mum says that you were born in summer, you get July 1

[dieter268]

I sort my catalog by default by capture time, so, yes,  I want edit the capture time.
I have my filenaming convention already that works fine for me.
After some thinking about your suggestions I will date photos from which I do not know the day with sequential days, time 00.00, so it's a quiet clear indicator.
Pictures where i know the day get a "even" timestamp, with xx:00 min and 00 sec. so they are indicated too.

Thanks to all for their contribution!

Dieter

[wolfnowl]

If you have Lightroom, simply select the image(s) in the Library module and go to Metadata/ Edit Capture Time. You can either offset the capture time incrementally or you can select an absolute capture time - e.g. August 15, 1970, 2:01:14 p.m. If you want a different date/time you'll have to do this for each image or group of images.

Mike.