Best way to organize old scanned photos

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Level 1

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Best way to organize old scanned photos

I have iPhoto 6 and I figured out how it organizes the photos by date order as burned into the picture by with the exif data. My problem is I have around 350 old pictures that were scanned. The pictures date back to the 1950-1979. They are not in any particular order, and they are named with the name i gave them at the time of the scan. What is the best approach to getting the photos into the Early Photos album? Presently, they are in my 2005 folder, which is the date they were improted to iPhoto. When I click the "get info>photo tab", there are no dates under "image", only a date under "File", which was the scan date or date imported to iPhoto (not sure). iPhoto seems to be sorting and organizing by this date. Can I edit or add an "image date" somehow?

iMac FP 20", Mac OS X (10.4.5), 1.2 Gig Ram, External f/w Drive

Posted on Mar 11, 2006 4:42 PM

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Answer 1

Old Toad

Level 10

217,126 points

Mar 11, 2006 4:58 PM in response to Jerry1258

Jerry:

There's an application, "A Better Finder Attributes..." that can batch change the created and modified to whatever you want. A folder of them with the same dates will be imported into a roll with the same date as the the modified date. If each has a different date the roll will take the latest modified date. But the files will show up in the Early Photos section of the library. You can find the application at VersionTracker.com.

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Answer 2

Mar 12, 2006 2:14 PM in response to Jerry1258

There is also a small program called 'Miana'.

Miana is a drop application utility for setting the creation date and/or time of a folder and all of its contents to a specified date and time.

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/26900

Works well for scanned photos, and for assigning creation dates for all my old olympus photos and my pc software at the time ignored metadata of the images, so they were all tagged with the date/time when I made the backups on CD, and not when the images were actually taken.

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Answer 3

HeyJP

Level 4

2,400 points

Mar 12, 2006 6:22 PM in response to Anthony Inae

The two programs mentioned above are good solutions prior to importing them into iPhoto.

If you have already imported them, you can select an image or set of images and use the Batch Change command under the Photos menu.

Select Photos/Batch Change...
Select Set "Date" to xxxx

Pick the date and time you want to set them too. You can pick a default increment of time for each photo.

I did a similar thing in that I shot a bunch of old family images dating back to the 20's, 30's, and 40's.

First thing I did was to batch change all to a specific date, well in the past, like 1/1/11. Then as I identified images, I batch changed the date to the correct date or as close as I could get it.

Generally I put the date to 1/1 of a given year if I know the year, but not the actual date. The "1/1" is my indicator that I don't know the real date. Or you can pick some other aribitrary day/month to be your "flag" that you don't know the real date.

For me, I scan a load in an evening, put it into iPhoto, and it may be weeks or months before I'm at a family get-together that allows me to date and add comments to some the pictures from other family members.

Jim

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