Timeline Questions

[Frank]

In the past :-) I used ferdinands Date script. What was really great was the fact that I could decide which Date should be used to categorize the image.

My question:
Is there a way, that all picture which do not have a proper exifdate created will not be added to the timeline
Because I handle many scanned pictures some pictures are already well tagged and some are not. So it would help a lot if I could see the images which do not have a proper date.

[Mario]

See Technical Reference > File Date and Time  in the IMatch help for information about how IMatch determines file date and time.

In a later version of IMatch 5 I may make the timeline configurable to use different time stamps. But not for IMatch 5.0.

[jch2103]

Another approach would be to use the Filter tab.

For example, if you set the Value Filter to use 'Date Subject Created' (XMP Photoshop\Date Subject Created), you can filter for images with specific original dates (i.e., the date the original photo was created - assuming that tag has been used in your images). To filter for images with no value, just set 'Files with value' and then use the check box 'Invert the result'.

You can also use the Value Filter the same way to check for digitized dates (Composite\Create Date).

Note, though, that there are many metadata date tags, with similar or overlapping names. You may need to check (using the Metadata Browser panel, for example) to confirm you're using the right tags in your filter.

[Photon]

Is there a way to filter scanned images? Of course they have the wrong (or no date?), but what is the indication/difference between digital images from cameras and digital images from scanners? Is there a principle difference? Or does the user has to dig in and research various meta data?

That is my key wish with scanned images: Detect them all, correct date/time yyyymmdd-HHMM with yyyy0101-0000, yyyymm01-0000 or yyyymmdd-0000 and finally rename them with yyyymmdd-HHMM_id.ext. Time 0000 can indicate a scanned image with day unknown or even month unknown. The id can be the original number from scanner or a random number. The question is, which steps are best to get correct display of date/time in Imatch, timeline and optional to achieve the file renaming inside IMatch? For correct time sorting of multiple images of one day (e.g. special event with multiple images per day) either the minutes or seconds have to be increased incrementally (e.g. HHMM = 0001, 0002, ...) or time is always HHMM=0000, but then the ID has to be incremented per image in order to achieve good sorting. I prefer the first renaming option with incrementing time, because any incremented ID is no longer really unique.

Regards, Martin

[Mario]

Or does the user has to dig in and research various meta data?

Likely. Does your scanner software add any EXIF or other metadata?
Check your scanned images in the Metadata Panel (Browser layout) to see all the data there is. Better scan software records some data into the EXIF record, e.g. the name of the scanner. If not, check the date and time data shown. The create date of the file may tell you if this was a day where you scanned files...

If you find a usable tag, it's just a "Find all files with this value" from the context menu in the Metadata Panel to find all files with the same value.

If the file has no EXIF record and no other usable metadata, IMatch uses the "last modified on disk" timestamp to assign the file in the timeline.