How do you deal with inexact/unknown dates of photos?

[FMiguelez]

Hello.
Since my studio is not ready yet, I'm bored and I've been sorting out my Photos collection. I've been scanning some physical photos, but I don't know the dates of most...

Given that mixing known and unknown dates makes the whole concept of date information meaningless (you wouldn't know whether the date in the Finder was the real date when the photo was taken or the date when it was scanned/sent to you, etc), I'm really trying to come up with some way to denote, within the date info, that it is an approximation or a guess as opposed to known/real.

I've searched the net, but haven't found any useful info. I was hoping I could get some kind of plugin for the Finder that it would allow me to format a date as ca. 1995, or Summer 1983, etc. I'm surprised there is not a way to do this!

I learnt how to change creation/mod dates. It's easy, but it requires the full YYYYMMDDHHMM information.

The most "convincing" workaround I found (which is not really convincing) is to set them like this>
1900 - if you don't know the year
January - if you don't know the month
01 - if you don't know the day
0000 - If you don't know the time

It is somewhat useful and better than nothing, but it's clunky and very clumsy.

Do any of you guys know of some way I could do what I want with unknown dates?
For those of you who take your photo libraries seriously, how do you deal with this?

I wonder how geologists/historians, etc. deal with this predefined stubborn date format we have to use in our OSs?

Thank you!

[bayswater]

You don't want to be messing around with the date in Finder. That won't affect the date shown in most photo apps. They use a date in the metadata of the picture itself. I often use the "adjust time and date" function in Photos (or the same in Aperture) to do adjustments to pictures that are scans of prints, slides etc assuming I actually know when the picture was taken. There is a date printed on most slides or negatives, but that's the date of development. I usually can figure out the year of a group of pictures from the people or event, and the rough time of year from the backgrounds. We rarely have snow in July. That's usually good enough.

If you have a lot of pictures to do in batches, there are also third party plugins, many free, many in the App Store that work in most picture apps, although they don't do much more than the built in stuff you fine in Photos etc.

Most of these change the date on a set of pictures forward or backward from its current setting, but there are some that will just set it to a specific time and date.

There are a lot of scripts people have written to so this.

Here's one. To use us, you select images in Photos, then run this (after you use the Apple Scripting utility to turn it into an app.)

set timeIncrement to 1 -- the time increment in minutes
(* select at least 2 images in Photos *)
tell application "Photos"
activate
set imageSel to (get selection)
if (imageSel is {}) or (the length of imageSel < 2) then
error "Please select at least two images."
else

set first_image to item 1 of imageSel
set first_date to (the date of first_image) as date
repeat with i from 2 to count of imageSel

set next_image to item i of imageSel
set next_date to (the date of next_image) as date

set time_difference to (first_date - next_date) ¬
+ ((i - 1) * timeIncrement * minutes)
-- return time_difference -- testing

tell next_image
set the date of next_image to (next_date + time_difference) as date
end tell

end repeat
end if
return "Adjusted the date and time of " & (the length of imageSel) ¬
& " photos. The last date is " & ((the date of next_image) as date)
end tell

[FMiguelez]

You don't want to be messing around with the date in Finder. That won't affect the date shown in most photo apps. They use a date in the metadata of the picture itself.

Thank you SO MUCH for that, Bays. You just saved me probably days, maybe even weeks, of work for nothing...

I tried a few tests to see how Photos app would respond to the changed creation and mod dates, and it did work! The "Moments" show the new date. I tried many different things and I came to the conclusion that, as you said, it won't work at all.

So Photos uses de changed dates IF and only if>
- the photo comes from a scanned file
- the photo comes from someone who sent it using WhatsApp (but what the person used to take the photo is uncertain)

However, when I tested with photos I knew for certain that came from my iPhone, and those did not work... It stubbornly kept using the original dates surely due to what you mentioned on how the date info is stored in the metadata. This is more than enough to ruin my original plan (so thanks again! Imagine discovering this after zillions of changes and mods, you wasted days for nothing!)
Doing this would make things worse because then you'd have 2 sets of dates> one that shows correctly (changed) in the Finder, and another that insists on using the metadata.

So the issues are>
--- how to deal with uncertain/unknown dates VS known dates (so you CAN tell the difference)
--- how the photo program imports and sees these photo properties from the source and knowing where those changes will take place (metadata VS Finder)
--- how to batch-do it, which should be the easy part, according to the script you put.

Hmmmm......

How do you deal with the 1st issue? It makes no sense to see photos from the 90s presented in a Photos Moment shown as September 2021...
Should I switch photo apps? I don't think I need more (except for date handling) from a photos program than what Photos offers.

[FMiguelez]

I just read the script carefully. That's interesting.
And these are just for the metadata, yes? It won't have any effect in the Finder?

[bayswater]

So Photos uses de changed dates IF and only if>
- the photo comes from a scanned file
- the photo comes from someone who sent it using WhatsApp (but what the person used to take the photo is uncertain)

I'd hazard a guess that Photos looks at the files dates and uses them if no date exists in the metadata.

So the issues are>
--- how to deal with uncertain/unknown dates VS known dates (so you CAN tell the difference)
--- how the photo program imports and sees these photo properties from the source and knowing where those changes will take place (metadata VS Finder)
--- how to batch-do it, which should be the easy part, according to the script you put.

Hmmmm......

How do you deal with the 1st issue? It makes no sense to see photos from the 90s presented in a Photos Moment shown as September 2021...
Should I switch photo apps? I don't think I need more (except for date handling) from a photos program than what Photos offers.

I've never tried to change dates for pictures in the Finder -- only in Photos, and before that in Aperture. You seem to be seeing that changing a date in Photos' adjust date function does not put the picture in the correct "Moments" bucket if the picture came from a scan. But that's not my experience. I have pictures taken in 1949, and using the adjust date function in Photos (or it might have been Aperture), correctly places these picture in the March 1949 section -- not in the section for the time I scanned them.

This appears to work just fine in Photos, even though I edited most of my dates in Aperture. It works both for pictures that came from a digital camera that stamps an EXIF date in the picture, and for pictures that were scanned from prints. Try this:

Right Click on a photo in Photos when in Moments view
Select Get Info
Double click on the Date in the info panel
The change date dialog page comes up. Change the year to one year earlier.
The picture should now appear in a moment from a year earlier.

Even with an app as basic as Photos, the only real problem I've had is whether I actually know when a picture was taken.

On the general issue of asset management, I was pretty happy with Aperture, and when it was abandoned by Apple, I looked around for alternatives. Lightroom appeared to be the only app that offered it but I find it's workflow bizarre, and it's expensive. Luminar came with the promise of asset management, but it never arrived and I stopped using it. I get by with Photos, although if someone came up with a good asset management alternative, I might still go for it.