Wednesday, January 30, 2008

I'm on a mission to fix all of our scans of old photographs so they have the correct date and location data. A scan of a photo from 1932 ends up with a "date taken" or something like 2008. Then photo management software gets screwy since the dates are wrong.

I'm trying a tool called Geosetter to edit the dates and add location data. It seems to work ok but it is very complicated. This looks like the best tool to edit the actual EXIF data in the image. Picasa and windows use a custom database to manage the imagery. Photoshop Elements Album appears to edit the EXIF data but it's more clunky and I'm not convinced it's working right. I like using Geosetter party since I know it's editing the actual file and not some database.

1. For date and time it makes be put in not only the time, but the time in relation to GMT. I use GMT-5, since that is the current GMT offset for Virginia. I don't quite understand why minus 5 also worked for Las Vegas pictures. When I review the EXIF data I don't see anything about GMT "offset".

2. Location data is very simple with geosetter. I just search for a location and click the little balloon to add the lat/long to the jpg.

ultimately I want to get rid of all the duplicate old files. Then start off with a sort of golf copy of the old photos with the right metadata.

I hope to get it down to a simple science so that I can digitize "all" of mine and Lara's family's hardcopy photos.