ACDSee Pro 2 and 2.5

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Approximate Dates such as year only or year + month only

(5 posts)

  • colin207
    Member

    Hi - I'm using ACDSee Pro 2.5 to organize a very large number of old photos, most of which have been scanned in. I want to set dates on those where I can. In most cases I do not know an exact date. Sometimes I might know a year, or approx year range, sometimes I might know that a holiday was taken in a given month of a year but not the date etc.

    Is there any way in ACDSee Pro 2.5 to handle such partial dates? As far as I can see, the Organize pane requires completely specified dates which I dont have. I dont want to have to enter, say, 1 Jan 1965 for a photo I know was taken sometime in 1965. I'd like to do as you can with genorlogy programs, enter a date such as 'about 1965' or say 'April 1965' - and yet also have the program use these dates for chronological sorting.

    Thanks for any help/advice.

    Posted On November 12, 2009 - 12:12 PM (8 months ago) (Permalink to this post)

  • Sam Dring
    Moderator

    Colin

    I have not got 2.5 loaded and the search doesn't work on Pro3/Win 7 yet but fairly sure you can use the search pane in Search file Properties for then Add and choose exif date.  You can do this twice - 1 after 2008 and the second before 2010 to give you 2009.  I will, no doubt, have the terminology wrong but it's something like that!

    Incidentally, why don't you set up a convention to enter your dates on scanned images such as:

    1.  1 minute before midnight on the last day of the month means you know year and month.

    2.  1 minute after midnight on the 1st day of January means you know year only.

     

     

    Posted On November 12, 2009 - 01:27 PM (8 months ago) (Permalink to this post)

  • colin207
    Member

    Thanks for the suggestion. When you have some 10,000+ images this would be very tedious indeed entering the data! And besides, it does not get me the kind of date display I would like. E.g. for a photo I know was in 1956 I want the program to display it e.g when labelling a printed photo as "1956" and not "1 Jan 1956 12:01am" of whatever. But it would get an approximate sort ordering OK. This would not work well when the year is itself only approproximate but I cannot see a good solution to that.

    Posted On November 12, 2009 - 01:35 PM (8 months ago) (Permalink to this post)

  • John Radcliffe
    Member

    The only "solution" I can see is to use two separate fields (I'll call then Date1 and Date2) to allow a date span. If you know the date exactly then Date1 = Date2. Of course this would increase the data input required, but if it does what you want it might be worth the effort.

    E.g.
    "Images One": thought to have been taken early in 1995 > set Date1 = 1 Jan 1995 and Date2 = 31 Feb 1995
    "Image Two": might have been taken any time from 1991 to 1995 > set Date1 = 1 Jan 1991 and Date2 = 31 Dec 1995

    In this case a search for images "possibly taken in the second half of 1995" (by specifying "Date1 before 23:59 on 30 Jun 1995" [the end of the search period] and "Date2 after 23:59 on 31 Dec 1994" [the start] ) would return both images.

    You might consider using "Date/Time original" for Date1 and "Date/Time digitized" for Date2 as for any digital camera images these should automatically be the same.

    Posted On November 13, 2009 - 02:28 PM (8 months ago) (Permalink to this post)

  • Marc Sabatella
    Moderator

    Both ACDSee's database and the EXIF info in the image files themselves understand only actual dates, not approximations.  So one way or another, you've got to enter something specific.  Probably lots of different shortcuts you could use to enter info quickly, but one way or another, it's going to be specific dates that get entered.

    Posted On November 13, 2009 - 10:12 PM (8 months ago) (Permalink to this post)

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