Personal Timestamps

2022-01-08

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I am a relentless data hoarder. My NAS contains several terabytes of files, many of which are backups of personal and family history such as documents, scans, photos, videos, or audio recordings.

Among that collection are thousands of photos we've taken with digital cameras. Most digital cameras do not add dates and times directly to the file names of the pictures; they instead list the timestamp as part of the EXIF data of the image. If the date is set incorrectly in the camera's settings, the dates in the EXIF data will also be wrong, but they will usually be accurate relative to each other.

I ran into this exact problem yesterday while trying to add dates to a set of photos from my Eagle Scout service project with the Boy Scouts of America. Fortunately I had a set of photos taken with a different camera that did have correct timestamps, and since both were used to photograph some events simultaneously, I was able to deduce the correct times.

I'm also trying to catalog what all these photos are--and that's proven to be a much harder job. I usually have to rely on tricks like searching archives of my Facebook messages to see where I was going or who I was with. Sometimes I need to reply on memories of the general circumstances or even geographical features found of Google Earth to pinpoint a location. Accurate timestamps are an essential part of this endeavor.

Archiving and sorting my documents like this is very fun. I feel like a digital sleuth, investigating my own past to figure out what I was doing, where, when and with whom.

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[Last updated: 2022-01-08]