How to automatically increment EXIF creation/digitization date for many scanned images

[mightyjabba]

I recently bought an Epson FastFoto 680-W for the purpose of digitizing a lot of old film-based photos for people in my family, and it works well. It can scan stacks of up to 40 or more photos in a very short amount of time. However, while the Epson software will assign a year to the scanned photos, they will all have the same exact digitization date in their EXIF data, with file names that increment. When I drop a large number of these into Photos, it seems to just import them at random, which can mean that events occur out of sequence, etc. I have tried to get around this by importing the photos in smaller batches of related images, but what I would really like to do is have the EXIF date increment for each photo by a minute or so, ensuring that they appear in the right order. I haven't had any luck finding a utility that can do this, so I thought I would call upon you good people. Any ideas? Or is there a different approach I should be taking? Thanks.

 

[MacUser2525]

A few minutes of searching found this, ExifTool, for doing it all with the data in the pictures. It is a command line tool so you can use it in a script to process the files in the directory. You would just need to get the first file, its creation time, then process each file after it to write the new time based on the sequential processing of the files.

ExifTool by Phil Harvey

A command-line application and Perl library for reading and writing EXIF, GPS, IPTC, XMP, makernotes and other meta information in image, audio and video files. For Windows, MacOS, and Unix systems.

exiftool.org

 

[robgendreau]

Lightroom would add a more useful time stamp, as would Photo Mechanic, XnviewMP, Bridge, Graphic Converter, etc. I would have thought Photos could change times and dates, but I guess not.

 

[mightyjabba]

Lightroom would add a more useful time stamp, as would Photo Mechanic, XnviewMP, Bridge, Graphic Converter, etc. I would have thought Photos could change times and dates, but I guess not.

It can change dates and times, but not increment them in the way I want. And in any case, they are already out of order by the time they are added to Photos because of the way importing works. If it would just import them in file name order this wouldn’t be a problem in the first place.
[automerge]1578117945[/automerge]

A few minutes of searching found this, ExifTool, for doing it all with the data in the pictures. It is a command line tool so you can use it in a script to process the files in the directory. You would just need to get the first file, its creation time, then process each file after it to write the new time based on the sequential processing of the files.

ExifTool by Phil Harvey

A command-line application and Perl library for reading and writing EXIF, GPS, IPTC, XMP, makernotes and other meta information in image, audio and video files. For Windows, MacOS, and Unix systems.

exiftool.org

I did see that but I was hoping for something that wasn’t a command line tool.

 

[MacUser2525]

I did see that but I was hoping for something that wasn’t a command line tool.

Not likely unless you write the GUI yourself, a script is not hard to do you write it once and reuse many times.