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Revisiting Images/Photos

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darichman:
Hi all - a breakout post from another thread (as per your request Jim!) I have a few nagging limitations in workflow for handling photos and personal videos (home videos from camera, phone etc) so would love these to be revisited.

But namely
More control over date handling, ?updating EXIF, IPTC integration (scanned photos, incorrect dates are a nightmare)
Revisiting tag mapping to improve integration with other platforms (lightroom, google photos)
   Some lightroom compatibility requests in this thread (2020)
Cleaning up date reading in camera/phone video files when imported (details in the linked threads below)
Fix/move/add geotags could be cool with some map integration

I described my image/photo worfklow here, which hasn't really changed that much. I'll copy relevant excerpts below:

* My 'photo' collection is a large and varied collection of image files of varying file types (some easily taggable and some not) and sources (eg many scanned images of older printed photos as well as digital camera/phone photos & videos)
* I would ideally like to stick with MC for as much of my workflow as possible (tagging, organising), but have to venture out to other programs where MC is unable to perform certain tasks (face tagging, geotagging, batch update of dates, EXIF editing, sharing through cloud platforms) especially Google Photos
* The capabilities of google photos (and other cloud services) are hard to ignore and integration should be the aim.
* I am not a fan of relinquishing my photo collection in its entirety to the cloud. I like to pick what I want to upload from my 'master' MC library (and can use a tag to flag this!). The automatic cataloging features of Google Photos are amazing, but if I want to change anything, I'm locked out. Have you tried tagging dates, multiple photos etc in Google Photos? You cannot manually tag faces or places either. There is no transparency as to how this metadata is stored, and if I download these photos and import in MC none of that data is there. I will only ever view this as a convenient, easily sharable 'copy' of a subset of my library.
* Sometimes editing photos or metadata in programs external to MC (eg facetagging or geotagging in Lightroom) can change tags/metadata in unexpected ways (date, fields not updating in MC even if manually requested)
* Photo editing is probably a separate beast so I'll leave that out of this thread.My main desire is to have MC as the main truth for import, tag, organise of photos. But then to use it to share to other platforms (and to play nicely with them on the metadata front where possible). I am android/google based, so once my photos are tagged the way I want locally, I want to upload them to the cloud (google photos).

Here are my problems with my current workflow:

* Scanned photos represent a problem: while I can use MC to set the dates, these are not written to EXIF/IPTC. When I import MC-tagged scanned photos into lightroom, google photos etc, they always use the scanned date, which makes organisation a mess. There are naturally other tools out there to manage EXIF tags, but this is another step which I'd love to avoid given I have the correct dates in MC. Please write [date] to the file in a way that other software will read it!
* Upload to Google Photos: Unfortunately, from what I can tell, very little metadata finds its way onto Google Photos (date, keywords, camera details). I would somehow love [Album] to magically map, but this field doesn't seem to be read by Google or Adobe
* Re personal videos: I still get dodgy dates for videos when I import from android (or from a camera SD etc)
See posts from 2012, and ten years later 2022
The correct 'Date' should be that in [date created]. Each time I mass import videos from my Pixel phone, I have to remember to copy [date created] to [date] so they tag/sort correctly
For me, some attention to photos and home videos would be a big win. Thanks for any attention in MC31

JimH:
There was a date change recently that might help:
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,135364.msg939375.html#msg939375

I think there was also an EXIF tag change.

darichman:
Thanks Jim

Yes, the batch 'Adjust date/time' is great. I use it in any case where a batch of photos from a camera had the wrong date set (great for increments where they are all out by the same amount)

But this does not help for scanned photos, and does not negate the date stored in the file not being updated in a way that can reliably be read by other programs.

I have made a few screenshots to illustrate date issues with photo import/workflow

Import from Phone/OS into MC
See attached pictures. In this example, the correct [Date] for both the photo and video is 9th April 2023  5:34pm (9/4/2023, I'm in Australia). This is the time they were both 'taken'. You can see in the file system filename, the phone for some reason uses PXL_20230409_073437401. The difference in the time element of this, I suspect may be due to timezone settings of the device... the actual time is 5:34am, not 07:34am.

* 1: Mixture of photos/videos to be imported from phone SD card (Google Pixel 6 Pro). Note fairly standard file naming convention in file system
* 2: Photo Windows properties: note displays correct date under 'Date taken'
* 2: Video Windows properties: note displays correct date under 'Media created'
* 3: This is the initial view when both files imported into MC (drag and drop). MC strips the additional filename string from the video file and just puts 'Pxl' in name. This is undesirable as there are dozens of videos and all will be named 'Pxl'. For the photo, MC retains the full filename for in [Name] (desired) and prefills [Album] with a short-form date
* 4: I changed the view to show some of the different dates, unedited (what shows when first imported into MC). For the video, MC is showing 9/4/23 7:43am for the video. This is incorrect - I suspect it's trying to pull this from the filename itself? Or from Date created? The correct date is actually in [Date Modified], so it's necessary for me to copy this to [Date] on every import of phone/camera video files. For the image, the correct date is used in [Date], but I have no idea where MC is getting the [Date created] time of 8/5/23 1:27pm and [date modified] time of 8/5/2023 1:42pm. At any rate, MC is showing different values for the photo and the video, which were taken at the same timeNext post, will show challenges with photos from other sources (eg scanned) and limitations with lightroom and Google Photos

darichman:
Dates and Scanned Images

In this example, this is a digital image from a photo that was taken on 6th Jan 1969 (6/1/1969), scanned on 16/4/2008 and imported into MC today (8/5/2023). Really, the only important 'date' is 6/1/1969. I don't really need to know or care when I scanned it, although some might. Desire is for the main [Date] to be 6/1/1969.
* 5: See windows file properties - [Date taken] 16/04/2008 11:17pm (photo was scanned with Adobe Photoshop). In the second screenshot, can see [date created] 8/05/2023 1:54pm (not actually, I just copied the file to a new folder to do this test) and [date modified] 16/10/2011 6:25pm (not sure why, possibly an old tag edit from Adobe)
* 6: When imported into MC, reads the [Date] as 16/10/2011 6:25pm (ie the same as date modified) and [date created] 8/5/2023 1:54pm. Of course it doesn't know the actual date yet as I haven't tagged it.
* 7: I tagged the [Date] field as 6/1/1969, the date the photo was 'taken'
* 8: As a test, I tagged a few MC fields [Album] (MC Album), [Caption] (MC Caption) and Keywords (MC Keywords)
* 9: When I look at the windows property of the file again, the [date taken] is still 16/04/2008 11:17pmWill split rest of post to permit attachments...

darichman:
10 Imported file into lightroom (after tagging above in MC):

* Lightroom correctly pulls the correct 6/1/1969 date into the general [capture date] field and IPTC [date created] field. It pulls the 16/4/2008 date into the general [date] field
* It does not pull [Caption] or [Keywords] from the MC tag11 Imported file into Google Photos

* Google photos reads the date as 16/4/2008. The correct 6/1/1969 date does not appear anywhere.
* MC's [caption] field is listed under an 'Other' field. There is a 'Description' field in Google Photos that would be the best mapping for this
* Google photos does not see [keywords] or [album]. Google has an Album field, but I'm fairly sure there's no way to force it to read from the tag (which would be ideal in a perfect world)Thanks for looking at this Jim and team!!

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