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Timeline Scan – AI fixes the dates on your scanned photos

timelinescan.com

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Re: Timeline Scan – AI fixes the dates on your scanned photos

#21

Post by hamdingers »

mbauman wrote: post #8

The problem I have is that there's no way to embed an "uncertainty" into EXIF metadata in a standard way. I just want some photos to be "Summer 1987" or "February 1976" or even "1981-1983"... but I _have_ to invent some complete timestamp down to the second and then just rely upon captions or comments. But I generally know the dates far better than any AI could guess (based on ages of the individuals I know).

I figure out the most significant value I can and just zero/one out the rest. So "February 1976" becomes 1976-02-01 00:00:00. That is an unlikely timestamp, so it tells me the whole thing is an estimate.

This convention works for me because I'm dating slides and negatives taken by deceased relatives before I was born, mostly of children I've only known as adults. Aside from birthday parties I never know the specific day, and it's unlikely anyone in the future will really care beyond having the pictures in a reasonable overall order.

Re: Timeline Scan – AI fixes the dates on your scanned photos

#23

Post by HoserHoser »

meatmanek wrote: post #22

> Scan the backs I guess this is assuming some scanning rig (camera scanning?) where it only takes a few seconds per photo. With a flatbed scanner, scanning the backs is almost certainly going to take longer than just typing dates in manually.

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.

Re: Timeline Scan – AI fixes the dates on your scanned photos

#24

Post by SirFatty »

HoserHoser wrote: post #17
SirFatty wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, seems like snake oil with a dash of malarkey.

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?

Re: Timeline Scan – AI fixes the dates on your scanned photos

#26

Post by HoserHoser »

ElijahLynn wrote: post #25

This product seems like it could be pretty magical if it works well! And I could see it being pulled off in the age of our current AI. It's great to see stuff like this hitting the market!

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.

Re: Timeline Scan – AI fixes the dates on your scanned photos

#27

Post by HoserHoser »

SirFatty wrote: post #24
HoserHoser wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Re: Timeline Scan – AI fixes the dates on your scanned photos

#28

Post by wanderingstan »

mbauman wrote: post #8

The problem I have is that there's no way to embed an "uncertainty" into EXIF metadata in a standard way. I just want some photos to be "Summer 1987" or "February 1976" or even "1981-1983"... but I _have_ to invent some complete timestamp down to the second and then just rely upon captions or comments. But I generally know the dates far better than any AI could guess (based on ages of the individuals I know).

I worked on a family archiving product (which dead ended) and dealt with this problem. My hacked solution was to repurpose the seconds value to encode precision, as you generally don’t care about seconds.

I forget the exact scheme, but it was something like this:

    0=minute precision 
    1=hour
    2=day
    3=month
    4=quarter/season
    5=year
    6=decade
Also note that the ISO date standard allows you to drop any digits you aren’t sure about, so all these are valid:

    1980-12-25T08
    1960-12-06
    1959-12
    196

Re: Timeline Scan – AI fixes the dates on your scanned photos

#30

Post by HoserHoser »

jonhohle wrote: post #29

How do I scan photos in alphabetical order?

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.

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