Hugo’s blog

I have been uploading old photos to Flickr, in order to have them all easily searchable by keywords, etc. However, I was reminded that a few years ago, I was not doing a great job at manipulating the photos metadata, and that quite a few did not have their EXIF data anymore.

And I have discovered that Flickr decides that, when there is no metadata in the photo, the date the photo was taken is the date that the photo was uploaded. I am not sure when this approximation is beneficial, especially these days when I expect cameras and tools to deal with metadata well; anyway, it certainly is not the case here. I would have preferred that this field be left blank.

ExifTool has helped me set the DateTimeOriginal and DateTimeDigitized in the photos that did not have one, and now Flickr reads the information from this data that I manually entered.

However, as it took me a while to notice this, I am left with hundreds of photos whose taken dates are wrong, and the interface to change those is painful, as AFAICT, it needs to be done on each photo individually. Maybe I’ll have to upload them again, though finding the originals again and uploading just the ones that were missing this information without duplicuting the others is going to be tricky.

Let this be a warning to others: check the EXIF of your photos before uploading them!