The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/intellifone on 2024-12-29 23:09:52.
Hi Datahoarders,
I’m helping my mom and mother-in-law digitize their photo albums and import them into iCloud Photos. My mom is finished scanning and then decided to report the issue, my mother in law got partially through her project before noticing that all of the photos are now mixed into her regular icluod library, which has been fun considering holiday photos…They’re using photo scanners (Epson and Fujitsu models, both recommended by this subreddit), and while the scanning part is going smoothly, we’ve hit a roadblock with getting the correct photo dates into the metadata.
Here’s the workflow:
When they scan a photo, the scanner’s app asks for the date the photo was taken—great! But instead of saving that date to the photo’s metadata (like EXIF data), it just adds it to the file name. This is fine for sorting in folders but completely breaks when the photos are imported into iCloud Photos or Google Photos, which rely on EXIF metadata for date organization.
I know both iOS Photos and macOS Photos allow you to batch-adjust dates manually, but that’s tedious, especially since they’ve already gone through the effort of entering the correct dates during scanning.
What I’m looking for:
- User-friendly software that can work with their existing Epson and Fujitsu scanners and directly save the date as EXIF metadata during scanning.
- A post-scan solution that reads the date from the file name and automatically updates the EXIF metadata, but it needs to be simple enough for them to use on their own (no command-line tools).
I’ve explored some iOS and macOS apps and even tried creating an iOS Shortcut to process this automatically, but I’ve hit a wall—none seem to write the dates back to the EXIF metadata.
Has anyone solved this issue with easy-to-use software or tools? Ideally, I’d like something straightforward enough that I can set it up for them once, and they can handle the rest without much trouble.
Thanks in advance for your help!