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Comment by mbauman | Hacker News Reader

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).

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I figure out the most significant value I can and just zero/one out the rest. So "February 1976" becomes 1976-02-01 00:00:00. That is an unlikely timestamp, so it tells me the whole thing is an estimate.

This convention works for me because I'm dating slides and negatives taken by deceased relatives before I was born, mostly of children I've only known as adults. Aside from birthday parties I never know the specific day, and it's unlikely anyone in the future will really care beyond having the pictures in a reasonable overall order.

I worked on a family archiving product (which dead ended) and dealt with this problem. My hacked solution was to repurpose the seconds value to encode precision, as you generally don’t care about seconds.

I forget the exact scheme, but it was something like this:

    0=minute precision 
    1=hour
    2=day
    3=month
    4=quarter/season
    5=year
    6=decade

Also note that the ISO date standard allows you to drop any digits you aren’t sure about, so all these are valid:

    1980-12-25T08
    1960-12-06
    1959-12
    196

The last one seems like it could also be problematic, how do you distinguish the 1960s decade from the literal year 196. In this case it’s kind of obvious since photography wasn’t very popular in the year 196.

Interesting question. From the Wikipedia article,

> ISO 8601 allows Gregorian dates from the introduction of the calendar on 15 October 1582.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Dates

You supply the ages with the software and AI uses that just like you would.

If it doesn't know the month, it puts it in June. If it doesn't know the day, it puts it on the 15th. But yeah, old photos with EXIF is more to be used by putting them in an order of photo1 comes after photo2, etc. Not necessarily photo1 is exactly 1982, etc. Viewing and enjoying old family photos is more about the order, and less about the exact year (at least for my family and friends).

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