I'm coming to the end of my trial period with PM, and it's convinced me to purchase the program. The functionality of the software, plus the support by the Camera Bits developers via this forum, is extremely impressive! I do have a workflow question based on my limited experience with PM:
Background:
One reason I've been kicking the tires on PM is that I've launched a personal project to digitize all of my photo archives that predate my conversion to digital about two years ago. This project will include scanning large numbers of negatives - both regular and APS cartridges - and prints for which negatives cannot be found. Obviously this project is a long-term one that will consume any "spare" time for many, many months. It goes without saying that the scanning process itself is a large time consumer. However, my objective is to also capture and archive as much annotation of the individual images as possible. [It's probably a sign that I'm into the existential phase of my existence!] My search for a tool that would help with the job of adding the IPTC and (pseudo) EXIF information led me to trial PM - and so far I'm very impressed with its capabilities such as the "stationary" concept, copy/paste from one image file to the next and so on.
For some photos - especially those scanned from prints that have some annotation on the back or in the physical album - I have an accurate date for when the photo was taken. I can then use PM (or other tools such as ExifUtils or ExifTool) to fill in the EXIF date captured field and IPTC field with the date. And I can go on to add headline, caption, keywords etc etc. However, for many photos the accuracy of the date is +/- months or even years in some cases. I've decided to use some form of convention for the date/time fields to handle this reality, and still provide for future searching etc.
Workflow question(s):
After scanning negatives in groups of 2-4 in the case of traditional strips, or up to 25 or 40 in the case of APS cartridges, I'm left with a collection of image files that have no relevant IPTC or (pseudo) EXIF data. Since my convention for naming image files is based on the date & time of the original photo (yyyymmdd_hhmmss.jpg/psd/etc) my first step is renaming the files. I would like to be able to manually arrange the images in say a contact sheet layout based on my (non EXIF) knowledge of the capture dates, and then apply some batch renaming and EXIF field update specific to that order. Say, this group of ten photos was captured in March of 1995 but I don't know the exact day, so I want them renamed 19950301_nnn, where nnn increments in the order they have been arranged in the contact sheet. [I would use this variation of name format as a flag to indicate the accuracy of the dating.] I would then go on to add IPTC info for the individual files using PM's great batch tools. Is there any PM function or technique someone could suggest to help with this workflow? Am I missing another more obvious approach?
Thanks// Chris Freeborn
P.S. It would be great if there was an affordable scanner that could read the EXIF type information that's encoded on APS negatives. With the camera I used, this included the unique APS cartridge serial number, date, exposure information etc. <sigh>
