Search dates without year

It would be awesome to be able to search by month and day without specifying a year. This would allow you a simple way to see “on this day in history” photos.

If there is already a way to do this, just let me know!

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I haven’t totally thought this through, but perhaps allowing a ? replacement character would be a good way to do this.

e.g.
date:???-04-26
date:202?-04-26
date:2021-04-2?

This could allow for some interesting possibilities.

edit: seems like there’s something in Discourse that replaces any number of questionmarks greater than 3 with 3. So, imagine that there are 4 question marks in my first example.

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Uh, so, it certainly would be better to support this properly, but at least in the current alpha, due to the way I index tag paths, you can just search for the month number and it’ll show you all assets taken that month, sorted by captured-at.

Unfortunately, it’ll also include any asset that also includes that number as a “word” in any other tag, including keywords, titles, descriptions, …

A proper solution would be to introduce a specific filter that built a strictly correct query, and then it’d also support specific days, as well.

What would be a good name for this filter?

  • date:????-MM-DD
  • onthisday:MM-DD
  • dayofyear:MM-DD
  • doy:MM-DD
  • your suggestion (click reply)
0 voters

(other related filters that might be interesting could be “hour of day”, or “season”, or “time of day” (night, dawn, day, dusk, … week of year, …)?

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I would avoid “dayofyear” or even “doy” because that could be confused with the ISO 8601 Ordinal Dates.

I personally think date: is fine… you can differentiate it from a proper date by the presence of a question mark character. It also could then conform to the same formatting rules as dates (YYYY[-MM[-DD]]), so it breeds familiarity to the conventions used by Photostructure.

Also, I totally forgot that this post is out there: Please suggest other search examples - #12 by mrm

I agree some “date:” syntax would be a good choice.

yeah would be great to eg. display all birthdays of a person etc.

Picking up this conversation from Discord:

@mrm:

omg this gets hairy quickly
when>????-08-31 is nonsensical

I agree… using greater than/less than does not make sense, so perhaps that could throw an error in the UI.

However, I do think you could make a between operator work. For example:

when:between ????-08-31 and ????-09-03

I think you’d need to check that the mask used is the same for both sides of the between.

One other thought on between

I have no idea if this is standard, but I’ve seen “double dots” to represent between, and I’ve always thought that was pretty elegant. For example:

2023-08-01..2023-08-07

FWIW, GEDCOM X defines a date range using a slash /. That doesn’t seem particularly user-friendly, and for example while FamilySearch uses the slash behind-the-scenes as the Formal representation, it also uses a Normalized, human-readable format to display to users. for example I see “from 1892 to 1915” as a sample range in English.

It’s interesting that GEDCOM X supports approximate dates. That seems like a useful feature for scanned photos where you might no longer know the exact date.