This is one I’m going to need every holiday season 🏖️☀️🏊😊

Every time I go for summer holidays I end up, one way or another, with a bunch of photos. You know, actual photos. The paper type. And lovely -in an old-timey way- as they may be, one cannot easily display it on one’s laptop, phone, tablet etc etc.

So what I do is scan them and upload them to the cloud. But then I have another problem: the date of the photos is not correct, and there’s no GPS location info (the so-called metadata). My cloud photo app doesn’t display it on the right “On this day” day. I also cannot find it by searching for e.g. “Cyprus” (where the photo above was taken, a looong time ago) and it won’t get shown when I create a map of where I’ve been.

First world problems, I know, but still. I googled around and found the solution using exiftool and touch (on linux) or powershell (on windows).

As a prerequisite, you need:

• For Linux: install exiftool using sudo apt install exiftool
• For Windows: download and install exiftool from here.

Next step is that, every time I have a new batch of scanned photos, I have to decide when and where they were taken. For old photos, this takes some guesswork but that’s ok -it doesn’t have to be 100% accurate.

Then I go to Google Maps and find the place they were taken in. Again, I don’t need it to be 100% correct. In the case of the photo above “somewhere in Larnaca” is good enough -that’s where we went for our customary end-of-highschool 5-day trip. After I find a suitable place I click on it and copy the coordinates.

Note that the these coordinates need an addition. You need to specify if you’re on the northern or southern hemisphere (i.e. above or below the equator) and west or east of the prime meridian (i.e. left or right of Greenwich, England).

In my case, Cyprus is on the northern hemisphere (N) and east of the prime meridian (E), so the correct way to write these coordinates is 34.914722N, 33.638000E. You can paste it in Google Maps to verify if it’s correct:

Now that we have our date (say, 15th of April 1993) and place (say, 34.914722N, 33.638000E) we’re ready. The process is quite simple:

• On Windows

1. Open a Powershell command prompt
2. cd C:\where\the\photos\are
3. Change the Modify Date:

gci *.jpg | % { $_.LastWriteTime = Get-Date -Date "1993-04-15 12:00:00" }

4. Tag the photos:

exiftool -P "-GPSDateStamp<filemodifydate" "-datetimeoriginal<filemodifydate" -GPSLongitudeRef=E -GPSLongitude=33.638000 -GPSLatitudeRef=N -GPSLatitude=34.914722 -GPSAltitude=10 -GPSAltitudeRef=1 -city="Larnaca, Cyprus" *.jpg

• On Linux

1. Open a command prompt
2. cd /where/the/photos/are
3. Change the Modify Date:

touch -d 1993-04-15 *.jpg

4. Tag the photos:

exiftool -P "-GPSDateStamp<filemodifydate" "-datetimeoriginal<filemodifydate" -GPSLongitudeRef=E -GPSLongitude=33.638000 -GPSLatitudeRef=N -GPSLatitude=34.914722 -GPSAltitude=10 -GPSAltitudeRef=1 -city="Larnaca, Cyprus" *.jpg

Note that the Northern/Southern and Western/Eastern (N and E in this case) are given separately in the GPSLatitudeRef and GPSLongitudeRef parameters respectively. Also note that, for completeness, I’ve added a height (GPSAltitude) of 10 meters.

Obviously you might change the filter (in my case I tagged all the jpg photos in the folder) but otherwise, that’s it. This is what they look like in my cloud photo app (I use amazon photos):

Have fun ☺️