Metadata: Fault-tolerant parsing of timestamps from Exif and JSON sidecar files

[jean-louis67]

I will probably reset the database and reindex all of my photos. I expect to lose some metadata. I would like if possible not to re-enter a number of dates.
In many scanned photos, I have defined the Date/Time Original field with exiftool. When the date is complete, it is taken into account by PhotoPrism. On the other hand, if there is only part of the date (year, or year + month for example), it is totally ignored, whereas we would like the year to be taken into account and the month and / or the day is declared Unknown
I tried with this one for example:

• "1993"
• "1993 12:00:00"
• "1993-00-00 12:00:00"

but without success.
Behind this subject, there is a significant time saving because with exiftool I can put a date, even incomplete, in dozens of photos at a time, while with PhotoPrism, you have to manually go through each of them, and operate 3 changes (year / month / day)
Well, at least as long as there isn't a way to apply the same change to several photos.

[lastzero]

You can enter "1993-00-00 12:00:00" with Exiftool and that works in all software? 00 is not a valid month, so typical date parsers will report an error. We would also have to set it to 01 internally as the database will not store it otherwise.

[jean-louis67]

Hello
I only tried with PhotoPrism. My goal is not to test exiftool, but to find out how to get PhotoPrism to recognize an incomplete date. For example "1993" and "1993-12" seem correct, but when indexed, year, month and day are all unknown. Maybe this is an unmanageable requirement. I am looking to use exiftool mainly because I can apply to many photos at once. If I could set the year and/ or month for multiple photos at once via PhotoPrism (issue 271 for example, batch editing), that would be fine for me.

[lastzero]

Batch edit will be implemented for sure, after our release so that users don't have to wait any longer :)

[tootbrute]

Batch edit will be implemented for sure, after our release so that users don't have to wait any longer :)

Nice! Can't wait.

[maxammann]

I like the idea of incomplete dates. Currently this function is used to check for a valid exif datetime. It is missing checks for partial datetimes:

photoprism/internal/meta/exif.go

Line 36 in bc86997

func ValidDateTime(s string) bool {

In fact this could be a good be a good beginner task, so I might find some time to implement this.