How to handle scanned images?

[mrm]

I just had a user ask

I have many source photos scanned from slides and printed photos. These all have no meta data, and file creation dates far in the future of when the photo was taken. What should I do with these files to ensure PS can sort them correctly by date? Do I have to add meta data, or change the file creation time, or something else? Many thanks in advance.

How PhotoStructure pulls out captured-at

PhotoStructure has a bunch of heuristics to try to pull in a “captured-at” date for your files:

How does PhotoStructure capture captured-at?

Solutions

Inferring the date via directory or file names

The easiest way to handle scans will probably to use folders that contain a “YYYY-MM-DD” string, like “Trip to Santa Barbara 2022-05-03”. If a file has a “YYYY-MM-DD” bit, that will override the date encoded in the parent directory. You can also use “YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM” if you have timestamps.

Adjusting date parsing via settings

There are a bunch of settings to support more “fuzzy” datestamp matching. See fuzzyDateParsing and fuzzyYearParsing for details.

Clearing metadata

If your scanning software includes the date that the image was scanned (which is never the correct time), that will “win” over any datestamp that PhotoStructure finds in the directory or filename.

You can use ExifTool to either remove these dates:

exiftool -AllDates=  path/to/image.jpg

(that’s a space after -AllDates=, which means “erase all dates found in the metadata”).

Fixing metadata

Or, if you prefer, rather than just erasing the metadata, you can update it to be correct:

exiftool `-AllDates=2018-02-18` path/to/image.jpg

which sets the date to February 18, 2018. ISO 8601 datestamps are accepted.

Scan at a good resolution!

Make sure your scanning software is configured to produce useable-resolution files—my Dad spent several days scanning stuff before he realized the scanned JPEGs were all 640x480, which is too few pixels except for a smartphone screen.

I suspect scanning prints at higher than 150dpi (or negatives higher than ~800dpi) will just waste disk space. If you have access to negatives, scanning those may result in higher quality due to print color fading and the fact that the print is a second-generation copy from the negative.

Backups!

Make sure you’ve got backups in place for all this work. I wrote up some tips here:

How do I safely store my files?

See also

Support manually editing capture time

Support for manually editing capture time (taken from the What’s Next page) Related: Support for manually editing tags Move files when captured-at time is modified or different to directory datestamp Edit: this topic used to also reference editing title, and description/caption, but this feature has been split out here: Support viewing and editing Title and Description

How do I get changed metadata into PhotoStructure's library on already scanned photos?

I plan to use DigiKam to scan for faces and add tags to my original photos. They are already scanned and copied by PhotoStructure. I have read the docs for syncing and rebuilding, but I still don’t understand if either of these jobs will update the metadata in PhotoStructure’s library. Or do I have to run DigiKam on both the originals and the PS library?

Handle egregious Google Takeout metadata butchering

I just had a user ask: I’ve noticed that google appears to have butchered the exif data from my Sony a5100. It is modifying the shutter speed for my images to be 1 second and may also mess with the aperture. This may cause photostructure to see separate assets. And, indeed: $ exiftool -j -ShutterSpeed *.arw *.jpeg [{ "SourceFile": "original.arw", "ShutterSpeed": "1/640" }, { "SourceFile": "takeout.jpeg", "ShutterSpeed": 1 }] Normally PhotoStructure discriminates images that have di…

Strategy when creation date or tag is not correct

I have a lot of scanned photos from the analog age. From most I changed the creation date and tags with the exiftool. But when I did an import in FS I saw that I forgot some photos/videos to change the creation date or the tags were wrong. I changed the creation date in the original and did a resync of the asset in FS. Now I have the photo with the old date and a photo with the new date in FS. I did not change the wrong tags yet. Basically my question is what is the strategy to change for ins…

[harrisc]

I am scanning some old images and afterwards I may want to change dates and descriptions etc.
What Exif editor with a GUI would be recommended for Windows 10?

In addition where should information best go, Exif title, description IPTC tags or where ever?
I am confused.
Can anyone assist?

[mrm]

@harrisc

where should information best go, Exif title, description IPTC tags or where ever?

PhotoStructure in general tries its best to find metadata in standard tags, and knows about “synonym” tags (like captured-at tags).

Currently, the title, subject, heading, and description tags aren’t rendered in the interface. When I code that up (and add that to the search index), PhotoStructure will have 2 new StringArraySettings (one for “title”-ish tags, and one for “description”-ish tags). The first non-blank entry will “win”.

TL;DR: use what ever tag is the default for your application: we’ll be able to handle it correctly (either out of the box, or by tweaking a setting or two).