Timeline Scan: AI Automatically Restores Real Dates to Your Scanned Family Photos
Timeline Scan – AI fixes the dates on your scanned photos
I built Timeline Scan to solve the frustration of scanned family photos appearing out of order. Instead of showing the scan date, our AI analyzes handwriting, timestamps, and visual clues to find the actual day each photo was taken. You can upload your files, and we return them with corrected dates ready for Google Photos, Apple Photos, or Immich, keeping your memories in their proper place without altering the original images.
Every photo you scan is stamped with the day you scanned it, not the day it was taken.
- mbauman
The problem I have is that there's no way to embed an "uncertainty" into EXIF metadata in a standard way. I just want some photos to be "Summer 1987" or "February 1976" or even "1981-1983"... but I _have_ to invent some complete timestamp down to the second and then just rely upon captions or comments.
But I generally know the dates far better than any AI could guess (based on ages of the individuals I know).
- bobchadwick
My dad was a prolific family photographer when I was growing up (which I guess we all are now, with our phones). He also meticulously cataloged the photos and used a spreadsheet (first created on our Compaq Portable!) to store "metadata" about them, such as descriptions, dates, people in the photos, etc. A few years back, as family Christmas presents, my parents had the photos digitized, and had someone add the "metadata" as a caption on every photo.
This led to the first AI-related project I undertook that really blew my mind. I wrote a python script that read the captions, then sent them to ChatGPT with a prompt that asked it to get the exact coordinates of any locations mentioned, and to get dates for captions that mentioned a holiday or other even, but not a date, e.g.: "Christmas 1987," my birthday, which I included in the prompt, etc. I was then able to apply the results to the exif data the majority of the photos.
Now when I open Google Photos, my timeline stretches back to the day I was born, and the location heatmap shows the where photos were taken on extensive road tripping we did as a family.
- bashtoni
Seems like a great idea for an Immich plugin. I'm really not convinced I or anyone I know would _pay_ for AI to guess the date a photo was taken though.
- jedbrooke
OCRing handwritten dates and printed timestamps seems useful, but how is “AI” supposed to know when a photo is taken just by looking at it?
At least the scan date is a real piece of data that could be useful. This seems like it would cause more harm than good by polluting the data with nonsense, unless the added dates are clearly labeled as estimates
- sixtyj
> Google Cloud (Gemini Enterprise): AI date extraction. Photos are sent to Gemini Enterprise solely for date extraction and are not used to train Google’s models.
Microsoft PhotoDNA: child-safety hash scanning (see “Child safety scanning”).
Technical background.