I created a simple app of known family geo spots, and manually geo tagged all my family's photos (8000). Did the exact same thing and gave it to my parents as a Christmas gift. It's all in Immich and the map is amazing.

I'm trying to help others get this same experience of enjoying their photos they grew up with; it's so easy to find a picture of me when I was 4 years old to compare against my kid today.

Scan photos as you have them, trying to keep similar events in time together. Then send them to Timeline Scan to date them so they're in chronological order.

Not sure what you mean by alphabetical order.

From your site, under "How we find each photo's real date" section:

Sequence Neighboring photos

Photos scanned in alphabetical order often belong together, so nearby files can give useful context to each other.

For the "older" people I've helped AI-date their photos, they think, "Why wouldn't my photos be in chronological order?", lol. I think they've grown accustom to how photos work on phones.

Epson FastFoto 680W is what most people use for scanning their collections which scans the fronts and backs at the same time.

(For flatbed scanning, I actually made a Mac app to help scan fronts with backs, lol. https://timelinescan.com/frontback-scanner [it's not as refined yet])

Getting handwriting from the back along with a potential date make scanning the backs worth it, for me, on a flatbed.

Lol. No, it scans against known photos with issues. Those types of photos AI won't process though, so we have to estimate them by just using neighboring photos.

Give a try and then tell me what I need to improve on. It solved the issue for my 8,000 family photo scans and I built the tool to help others!

Just sign up for an account and you can date 50 photos for free.

and what do you do with the images? Training AI?

Privacy policy: "We do not use your photos, metadata, or biometric data to train any AI model."

The images are yours in your account. I think there are better ways to get images to train a specific AI model than to make a small app for users to upload a few...

I work at a large social media company that handles photos. :salute:

You supply the ages with the software and AI uses that just like you would.

If it doesn't know the month, it puts it in June. If it doesn't know the day, it puts it on the 15th. But yeah, old photos with EXIF is more to be used by putting them in an order of photo1 comes after photo2, etc. Not necessarily photo1 is exactly 1982, etc. Viewing and enjoying old family photos is more about the order, and less about the exact year (at least for my family and friends).

It does well with visual queues in the photo if there is no handwriting for dates or timestamps. It's definitely not perfect but it will get it so your photos feel chronological in the sense of "photo A is older than photo B".

The way to increase the accuracy is to add a birth year to face tagging so each photo has an anchor that the AI uses -- "This photo has joe, joe is born in 1950" and then it will look at how old joe is and if joe looks like 10 years old, it knows the photo is around 1960.

I do integrate with Immich. It will find photos with missing EXIF data automatically for you. It will also only write back metadata to update the photos in place, so you don't have to do the upload-download-reupload dance.