I had a busy January 1st of this year. Wanting to start the year off with a bang, I took 90 observations.
But that isn’t my most busy January 1st! My most busy January 1st was apparently January 1st, 2013. According to the pictures in an external harddrive, that were previously in a different computer, and came from several different camera, on January 1, 2013, I was in:
Brookings, Oregon
Hamilton, Montana, both in the middle of winter, as well as on warm spring days.
The beach in Portland, Maine
Swamp land in New Orleans and Mississippi
The middle of downtown Chicago
A back alley in The Dalles, Oregon
Several other places in Oregon
And Vancouver, Washington
So the reason for most of these photos was: my camera was battery powered, and when the battery ran out, it would forget the date, and if I forgot to manually reenter it, it would default to January 1st, 2013. I think that was the case with more than one camera, and so I have multiple photos from years, all saved to that one day. Trying to figure out the real day (and place) they were taken often involves a lot of work. Also, I have other photos that were taken in other ways. Some of them were saved or sent by e-Mail. Often they are not in one place, but scattered around my harddrive.
Am I the only person with this problem? Does anyone else here have a backlog of pictures that might be interesting, but they have avoided uploading because they are too uncertain in their date and time, and reconstructing exactly when and where they were taken is too difficult?
I have a lot of photos saved with a date like june 2010 while they were shot in winter, and I hate it, as I hate myself for deleting >10k photos from one social resource because I thought they’re just bad artistically, so in the end I prefer no date to no photo.
This is why I take photos on my phone all the time: my camera is filled with photos that it will be a massive pain to upload, but if I take it with my phone it has date/time/GPS already in the metadata, and I can easily sort/upload without having to plug anything in. So lower quality images (but not hugely, modern phone cameras are pretty good) but way less hassle.
I end up with 1/1/2008 since the camera was manufactured that year. Luckily I usually notice pretty quickly because the file names are based on the date. I can piece together the real time/date.
I have hard drives of hundreds of thousands of images and have uploaded under 2000 observations. I’m very self-critical (trying not to be when it comes to iNat) and spend time editing everything unless it comes off my phone (which isn’t often). for now when I’m uploading things by a) scrolling through and picking out things that catch my eye or b) have a goal with a particular project to upload representatives of a taxon because I feel like it. not streamlined in anyway (and I’m dangerously close to being out of hard drive space) but it works for me. I often envy the photographers that upload dozens of beautiful photos a day, but that’s out of my realm for now and I’m ok with it.
I’m afraid there are multiple misunderstandings in your logic here. First and foremost is the reliance on a phone camera to get a proper date/time stamp. A recently identified glitch on Samsung phone cameras has lead to many thousands of erroneous date/time stamps on uploaded images from those products: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/possible-date-time-unix-epoch-issue-with-samsung-phones/17453
So relying on a phone date/time stamp still has potential glitches. I’m in the midst of some detailed research on Lepidoptera sightings in Texas uploaded to iNat, including the historical timeline of such uploads, and these erroneous date/time stamps are rendering thousands of observations worthless until/unless the dates are corrected–a huge headache.
Secondly, for one of my particular areas of interest, moths, phone cameras are still not sufficient to document any critter with a wingspan smaller than about an inch (perhaps 80% of all moths) and don’t provide enough detail to distinguish closely similar species. You’re correct that phone cameras have improved vastly, but they still aren’t a substitute for an SLR or even a good little point-and-shoot camera for fine details needed to identify many plants and insects. My $200 point-and-shoot Canon still outperforms the best phone cameras for tiny subjects.
I am still scanning film negatives from my Nikon, which are definitely not stamped with any sort of metadata. Fortunately, since I take so many photos, after several years I realized I needed to keep a sorted archive, so I would load negatives onto a plastic negative-holder page as soon as I got them back from the developer, and put them in a 3-ring notebook. For the first several years, though, as I caught up on the pile of negatives, they were not sorted in dated order. So I have quite a few marvelous photos that I cannot exactly date. Since film was precious, there weren’t tons so if I can narrow it down to within a month I figure that’s about good enough, and I arbitrarily set it for the first of that month (the location I can narrow down somewhat because I remember the particular event or trip or whatever). Over the years, because I’ve taken literally tens of thousands of pictures (now that digital makes that possible), I’ve taken to filing them in a dated file every week, a file for each day, including any shots taken on any camera that day. After that, I may copy some into collections of, e.g., a particular mushroom or a particular event, but I always retain the date organization. That way, even if the stamp is incorrect for some reason, I can still trace back the actual date. It took me a long time to decide on how to organize, and this date system has really worked.
That describes my problem exactly. I got my first camera for my 8th birthday (in 2015). It took me a while to figure out that I needed to reset the date, so it defaulted to January 2000. I pretty much indiscriminately photographed everything at that time, so mixed in with blurry pictures of my relatives and random cars I saw on the street are some fairly good ones of deer and juncos (those were primarily the only animals I could get close enough to photograph). But now I have literally hundreds of photos that claim to have been taken in 2000, even though that was 7 years before I was born. I keep planning to go through and sort out the dates, but I’m worried that if I stop partway through I might lose the information I need to be able to finish.
I have had a number of similar instances due to the camera’s internal clock battery draining and defaulting things back to something like January 1 2000, etc. Depending on what software you use to organize and edit your photos, this can be fixed relatively easily- I use lightroom and it’s pretty quick to shift date/time for a batch of photos. I’ll pick a probable date, select a photo in which I have a general idea of the time of day, and change it accordingly- and the rest of the selected batch shifts by the same amount.
These days I usually get lucky and notice the date reset the same day or within a few days, so as long as it hasn’t reset again in the meantime I’ll take a “time-key photo” of the gps-set time and date on my phone and then use that reference photo to shift all photos taken since the last reset. This is usually precise enough that I can then geotag by timestamp from a separate GPX track and get accurate locations.
Other software programs can probably do similar operations, maybe Darktable, EXIFtools, etc.
I’ve just been using the included Photos app on Windows 10, which doesn’t have lots of fancy settings and probably couldn’t do that. I think I’d need to reset them one at a time.
I just do very basic archiving, like immediately downloading pictures of the photoshoot onto my computer either that evening or next day. Create files with the date at the very least, then have this Excel spreadsheet with all the locations and GPS info. Which is what I am using now to upload my iNaturalist sitings. Certainly figuring out a procedure and file system is mandatory.