• Welcome to the Lightroom Queen Forums! We're a friendly bunch, so please feel free to register and join in the conversation. If you're not familiar with forums, you'll find step by step instructions on how to post your first thread under Help at the bottom of the page. You're also welcome to download our free Lightroom Quick Start eBooks and explore our other FAQ resources.
  • Stop struggling with Lightroom! There's no need to spend hours hunting for the answers to your Lightroom Classic questions. All the information you need is in Adobe Lightroom Classic - The Missing FAQ!

    To help you get started, there's a series of easy tutorials to guide you through a simple workflow. As you grow in confidence, the book switches to a conversational FAQ format, so you can quickly find answers to advanced questions. And better still, the eBooks are updated for every release, so it's always up to date.
  • Dark mode now has a single preference for the whole site! It's a simple toggle switch in the bottom right-hand corner of any page. As it uses a cookie to store your preference, you may need to dismiss the cookie banner before you can see it. Any problems, please let us know!

Naming convention and capture date assignment for scanned images

Status
Not open for further replies.

camner

Active Member
Premium Classic Member
Joined
Sep 28, 2008
Messages
737
Location
Tacoma, WA
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
Lightroom Version
Classic
Lightroom Version Number
10.2
Operating System
  1. macOS 10.15 Catalina
I've only been working in LrC with digital camera images, and capture date assignment is automatic. I use YYYY-MM-DD_original-file-name for my naming convention, and then sort in Library in capture date order.

Shortly, I will be working with about 8000 scanned images. For about 75% of them, I know the capture date within a month or two. For the rest, I may not even know the year. My digital image naming convention doesn't seem as useful. I'm curious about how others who have worked with a large quantity of scanned images handle this?

With respect to capture date (for scanned images), I'm wondering if there is a way to avoid having to adjust each image manually to something as close to the actual date as I can determine. I'm hoping that the scanning service scanned a given set of negatives (sent to them separated by film roll and I'll get the images back named by roll ) in the order I had placed the negatives in the envelope (by negative #, which translates into chronological order). If so, then I could use LR's batch capture date change capability, since that would increment the capture date setting by the difference in time of scan. How do others handle this in a somewhat efficient way?
 
Peter Krogh did a book about Digitizing photo's and there is a full chapter about naming convention. Some of his advice:
  • Start with a collection identifier (like MFA for Moorlag Family Archive)
  • Add a record group identifier (prints, negatives, slides, etc)
  • Add a unique identifier (two - four digit at the end of each file)
  • Use roll/frame numbers for negative identifiers
  • Use underscores between strings
For date based grouping he (and i now also) is using hierachical keywords like this:
cadate.JPG

If you know the exact date, you can tag that but in most cases you probably have to choose a higher level in the hierarchie
 
Last edited:
I've only been working in LrC with digital camera images, and capture date assignment is automatic. I use YYYY-MM-DD_original-file-name for my naming convention, and then sort in Library in capture date order.

Shortly, I will be working with about 8000 scanned images. For about 75% of them, I know the capture date within a month or two. For the rest, I may not even know the year. My digital image naming convention doesn't seem as useful. I'm curious about how others who have worked with a large quantity of scanned images handle this?

With respect to capture date (for scanned images), I'm wondering if there is a way to avoid having to adjust each image manually to something as close to the actual date as I can determine. I'm hoping that the scanning service scanned a given set of negatives (sent to them separated by film roll and I'll get the images back named by roll ) in the order I had placed the negatives in the envelope (by negative #, which translates into chronological order). If so, then I could use LR's batch capture date change capability, since that would increment the capture date setting by the difference in time of scan. How do others handle this in a somewhat efficient way?
When I started scanning family images, I "dated them" by decade and also gave each image a unique number string. If I had more information about an image, I adjusted the dating to reflect that. For example, if I knew the year, I would change that portion of the name, and repeated if I had the month and date. I do not know if this approach would easily work to scale with 8k of images, but the logic worked for me, allowed sorting in LR and it was flexible.

Good luck,

--Ken
 
I'm in the process of scanning family negatives, slides and photos. In many cases I may be able to get the year.

Since I didn't know what I would want to keep, I've started by scanning thumbnails then plan to go back to determine what I really want to work on. At that point, I'll make a full scan. However, in the meantime, I've been able to add metadata to each scan for those who come after (if anyone).

I used the file format of X-GGG-P-NNN.TYP for scanned images where:

  • X is the type of source – S=Slide, N=Negative, P=Picture.
  • GGG is the group number. Most of the slides and films are together that could be labelled.
  • P is the purpose of the scan. ‘F’ is for full scans. ‘T’ is a thumbnail quick scan.
  • NNN is a sequence number n the group. Note that this number will be different between any ‘F’ or ‘T’ copies of the same image. The sequence number does not relate to the slide or negative number on the transparency and is the incremental assignment by the scanner.
  • TYP is the file type. For Full Scans, it is TIF. For thumbnails, JPG.

I label the different packages with X-GGG.

In terms of setting the date, I do this externally before importing to LrC using EXIFTOOL. My logic there is:
  • CreateDate = Today
  • DateTimeOriginal = This is where it gets tricky as you know. For unknown dates, set to '1977:07:07 07:07:07'. If fill out what I know but use 7's as place holders.
  • UserComment=I stash as much info here about what I'm scanning as possible including any guesses on date.
I also assign other metadata tags that I know.
 
In terms of setting the date, I do this externally before importing to LrC using EXIFTOOL. My logic there is:
  • CreateDate = Today
  • DateTimeOriginal = This is where it gets tricky as you know. For unknown dates, set to '1977:07:07 07:07:07'. If fill out what I know but use 7's as place holders.
  • UserComment=I stash as much info here about what I'm scanning as possible including any guesses on date.
I also assign other metadata tags that I know.
Thanks for your extensive answer.
Since EXIFTOOL is a command line tool, it isn’t the quickest thing to use...do you do something to speed up the process?
 
Peter Krogh did a book about Digitizing photo's and there is a full chapter about naming convention. Some of his advice:
  • Start with a collection identifier (like MFA for Moorlag Family Archive)
  • Add a record group identifier (prints, negatives, slides, etc)
  • Add a unique identifier (two - four digit at the end of each file)
  • Use roll/frame numbers for negative identifiers
  • Use underscores between strings
This is an interesting approach. I’ll take a look at the link to his book. THanks.
 
Thanks for your extensive answer.
Since EXIFTOOL is a command line tool, it isn’t the quickest thing to use...do you do something to speed up the process?
I believe there is a GUI interface that you can use with EXIFTool. IIRC, you just copy EXIFTool exe into the GUI directory and then just need to open the GUI app.

--Ken
 
Since EXIFTOOL is a command line tool, it isn’t the quickest thing to use...do you do something to speed up the process?

It starts with the scanning process. I set up the file name prefix in the scanner then let it add the sequential number to the end. I couldn't be bothered trying to align the NNN sequence number to either the slide number or negative frame number. I just found a bunch of negatives with no sprockets so no numbers.

Yes, it can be an issue with command line work. I'm an old hand at it so created a number on BAT files around EXIFTOOL to help .

For a more on-line approach for changing dates, check out Victorias How do I change the photo dates on scanned / photographed images? | The Lightroom Queen with a reference to a LrC plug-in
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top