Timeline Scan – AI fixes the dates on your scanned photos

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).

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

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.

> 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.

Scanned photos all show up on the day you scan them. Timeline Scan estimates when each photo was actually taken and writes it into the file’s EXIF, so your archive sorts chronologically in Immich, Google Photos, or Apple Photos (or by folders if you’re one of those people). I increased the trial to 50 photos; try it out and let me know what you think!

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