How to tag images with incomplete dates ?

Question

Right now I am processing a lot of old color slides, that I have scanned and imported into Lightroom. For some of these photos, I know the exact date, when I took them. For others, I know only year and month, for others I know only the year. So there is no way to assign the exact date with the menu "Metadata / work on time of recording".

Which workarounds do you practice ? Is there a way to attach a flag to the image, indicating: attention, the date is only correct within a month ?

By the way: the same applies to GPS coordinates. For some of the photos, I know the exact location, for others I know only a rough estimate within 50 miles.

johnrellis · Accepted Answer

I use a similar convention as describe by Richard, using 00:00:00 to represent unknown time, 1 for an uncertain day of the month, and 1 for an uncertain month. I also use keywords to represent Uncertain Month and Uncertain Day to remove ambiguity (e.g. does 1969:01:01 represent just a known year, a known year and month, or a known year, month, and day). I think using keywords are a better choice than folders or collections.

The EXIF and XMP standards formally support unknown month, day, and time, but I don't know of any programs that support that. The Photoshop Elements Organizer tried to but got it horribly wrong (I haven't test it in years).

richardplondon · Answer

I've sometimes used exactly noon to denote "unknown time of day" - and first of the month in combination with noon, to denote "unknown day of the month".

I suppose one could use the nearest "exact" grid coordinate as an indicator, in a similar manner.

But primarily, if using a date based filing scheme such as YYYY / MM / DD one can easily supplement that with a "day unknown" folder or else put them loose in the month folder. Either way when you click on the "month" folder they'll be included along with the photos whose exact dates are known.

And: good idea to distinguish those photos where the date is still to be researched, or where the location is vague (and you care about that), with suitable keywords too. Personally I don't much care if the location is exact or loose or missing, since I primarily rely on location keywords which can label in an intentional manner for a region as well as / instead of a specific place.

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