Allow to set a circa / approximate date a photo was taken
Problem I'm trying to solve
I have a lot of family photos whose exact date (i.e. hour, day or month) I don't know but of which I do have a more 'vague' temporal reference (the year and month they were taken, or only the year.. or a general range of years, for ex. what decade they belong to).
I'd really like to have an option to chose an 'approximate' date in cases like these.
Approaches and solutions found in other places/platforms
It seems that the IPTC video metadata (v 1.3) has a field circaDateCreated
that would include these cases (not to be confused with the circaDateCreated
that is part of the Artwork or Object in the Image structure from the IPTC photo metadata).
ExifTool uses the tag CircaDateCreated
in its IPTC Extension schema for what seems the same porpoise.
(Found all that in this discussion about tagging historic photos).
On the other hand, Flickr has this feature but it appears it's not handling any of those fields/tags but using a different approach. According to its 'Photo dates' API doc, they add an extra field, granularity
, which tells
the accuracy to which we know the date to be true. At present, the following granularities are used:
0 Y-m-d H:i:s
4 Y-m
6 Y
8 Circa...
This allows, for ex., that this photo shows 'Taken circa 1920'.
Current workaround in Shotwell
The only option I've found so far is to chose the first day of the month (January when I only know the year) and to set the time to 00.00.00, when I don't know the exact date when a photo was taken. But I don't have any way to differentiate these cases from the 'normal' ones.