Creating an archive in Lightroom Classic

I have a problem with dates, because LR seems to want the precise date and time of every picture,

If you have scanned the images they will already have different 'Time' (HR:MM:SS) and Capture date from the scanner.

You can simply change the metadata (Menu: Metadata>Edit Capture Time) for Year and Month only. The exact hour need not change! You can change multiple photos (eg. a folder from one negative strip of images) and you have the correct YY:MM: and the scan time (that is basically irrelevant) HR:MM:SS.

I also rename the scan files with a Date..format, and also store the files in folders with Date/Location names.

This works for me.

Screen-clip shows photos with Capture date changed but 'Time of scan' as scanned!

Capture time Change

Hi Richard,

Yeah, I've got family photos from the early part of the 20th century and too many photos of folks I have no idea whom they are. Good luck and good for starting this.

It sounds like you're doing everything correctly, have the original photos in LR, bring them into PS (from Lightroom) and do what you need to do to make them look better, and when you close and save the images, they will return back to lightroom and self-create a Stack with the updated image on the top of the Stack.

As far as dates go, what you think you want you can't do. What is better though can be done: If you know a photo is from March of 1972. Give that photo the Keywords of "1972-3-March." If you know the actual day as well, put that at the end "1972-3-12-March." Here's why it should be done this way: Keywords are displayed alphabetically. If you have the Keyword date shown as "March, 1972," and another Keyword shown as "November, 1972," than those keywords will be far apart in the Keyboard list.

If you set up your Keywords so that logical groups are together (for example the year 1972), than that year will be all together. By adding the number of the month, they will show up in numerical order in the Keyword list. Adding the name of the actual month (e.g., "March") would be more for quick recognition benefit if you're looking for March, there it is rather than seeing "3" and trying to remember what month 3 is. That is more of an issue that I might have, if you do not, than do not worry about adding it. 

Also add Keywords for locations, events, and other things that you might want to bring into focus at a later time. 

Oh, one last important tip when scanning these images: Scanning is no different than taking photos: the better the quality of the photo, the less you have to do in Photoshop. When you scan, do not just load up the negative in the scanner and press Scan. Rather, use the scanners PS-like controls and try to get as good an image as you can at the time of scanning. You can certainly take care of scratches and things like that in PS but if you can fix any color cast, contrast, whatever to as close as you can then, than any adjustments you make later will go much quicker and be of higher quality. I can't really go into the full reasons here but do trust me on this.

Also, be aware that scanners can do both optical and digital enlargement. Do NOT believe the manufacturer that you can get amazing resolution from the scanner, they all lie, all of them. Depending on the scanner, you can get at least 200%, MAYBE 300% enlargement. Your software may not tell you this. But if you have a camera in your phone, when you zoom into the subject with the finger spread, that enlargement will NOT be as good as if you just took the photo and did some digital enlargement in PS. (It'll never be great, just "better.") [Small plug, Silverfast is the best scanning software out there I'm aware of. They can guide you as to how much enlargement you can safely get away with. I do not work for them but I've been using them for some 15+ years and I've tried many other scanning software.]

This tip will sound strange: save the black and white images as color images. This seems wrong since a color image will require 300% more storage space than B&W but the advantage is if (for example) there is some silver reducing out of the image, there are ways to fix that in PS IF the image image was saved in color. If it was saved as B&W, there is no way to recover the image.

And lastly lastly, always save in a non-lossy format. Personally I like TIF, but do not save them as JPG. Send fixed images to friends and family as JPG but your archive should be non-lossy.

Good luck, your family and generations following you will apprecaite what you've done.

Not sure what you mean by 'archive'. Not sure what you mean by 'access'. I'm pretty sure Lightroom Classic can do things like this, but you need to be more specific about what it is and how it will be used.