Come up with a code using the hours, minutes and seconds part of the date to indicate the status of the date field. 'DateStatus: 1950S2' In the edtf from the python library above.Ģ) Description or Notes field: Use a standard text string in one of these two fields similar to keywords solution above.ģ) Use the time aspect of the datetime fields to indicate the status. There are 3 main options I am looking at:ġ) Keywords: log the status of the date in a standard keyword format.

There are thousands of esoteric potential metadata fields that exiftool can read and write to, but also for compatibility sake, I'd like to stick to standard fields that most tools can at least read. That leaves the only option of using other fields to indicate the status of the date. My goal is a format to reliably log the metadata in the photo in such a way that it is clear when dates are accurate or guesses.įrom what I can tell, the ideal path (aside from everyone agreeing to a standard in metadata) is to not use partial dates in the standard date fields because of compatibility issues. I am in the process of scanning and archiving about 20k old family photos from the 1850s to today. GEDCOM, the standard genealogy format, supports its own version of partial dates įlickr has it's own version of partial dates that can only be updated online/API and not pulled through metadata: There is a python library that supports the extended datetime format, (not for metadata tagging though): I'd love to get my hands on some assets that LOC tagged with this spec to see how they log it. While the spec looks good, I haven't seen any solution of saving this as metadata.

It isn't guaranteed that other tools will know what to do with partial dates either way.ĭublin Core/ISO 8601/Library of Congress has a comprehensive spec for partial dates: For example, you can have just the year and month and no day, but you can't have month and no year. Or which ones are just missing.Įxiftool supports missing date elements, but only if you have the higher order elements. I want to be able to indicate what aspects of a date are real and which ones are estimated or calculated.

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