Managing Metadata for Scanned Photographs

[Jonathan Gunnell]

I'm in the process of digitizing thousands of family photos. I'm organizing them in folders by year, but I'd like to metadata to reflect the accurate capture date (the date the original photograph was taken, not digitized). I'd like to use the "capture time" since Lightroom allows you to sort by this field.

I've been struggling to find the most efficient process for this. Scanning the photos in chronological order would be impossible, so I'm manually adding capture dates to each file individually since batch adjusting the capture time changes all selected files by a fixed amount and there are often months, even years, between scanning sessions so not all of the photographs I'd like to batch process have the same start date.

I'm sure someone has written up a workflow for managing this type of project but I haven't had any success in finding it yet. Appreciate the help.

[GoldingD]

Maybe see:

How do I change the photo dates on scanned / photographed images? | Lightroom Queen

and another members Discussion, with some recommendations by other members:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-discussions/workflow-for-importing-scanned-images-a...

and from the above Discussion, at least one Plugin:

Capture Time to Exif | Photographers Toolbox | John Beardsworth

[johnrellis]

"since batch adjusting the capture time changes all selected files by a fixed amount"

The Capture Time To EXIF plugin, referenced in the article linked to by GoldingD, lets you set a batch of photos to have the same capture time, or capture times increasing by n seconds.