Add time between photos in a sequence?

[tgji]

I've used exiftool a bit before and I am a novice when it comes to coding, and I'm willing to try on my own but I'm not exactly sure where to start. Here's what I am trying to achieve:

I am digitizing all my parents old family photos — a huge undertaking because they were pretty consistent with taking photos of myself and my siblings as we grew up.

So that the photos can be easily added to whatever photo viewing/library software one prefers (e.g., Apple Photos or Google Photo) and benefit from curation features that use time/date/location (e.g., "memories" in Apple Photos"), I've been going the extra step of trying to date/time photos, and add location data.

This is fairly easy within apps like Apple Photos or using exiftool. However, I would also like to preserve the ordering of photos — and my preference is to try to guess time of day using the following heuristics:

• If it looks to be daytime, assume noon, if it looks to be evening, assume 8pm (or something like that — sometimes I get more precise (e.g., Christmas morning photos I set to ~8am)
• then, space all photos apart by ~5 minutes — so that the photos, already digitized in chronological order, would be set as: photo 1: 12:00 PM, photo 2: 12:05 PM, etc. etc.

This last step, performed manually, is painstaking and I cannot help but to think there's a better way to automate this process. Anyone willing to give me some ideas of how to do so using exiftool and whatever other software / programming language? Happy to "buy you a beer" (if you have a donate page, like https://ko-fi.com or something).

Thanks so much!

[wywh]

I have used a similar approach with my old scanned images and movies.

I use GraphicConverter (macOS) to set the metadata dates (and file dates). It can set the spacing between images -- I usually use 300-600 seconds (5-10 minutes) because that allows me to insert many images in between, if necessary.

I use GC Browser also to paste locations (from a spreadsheet although GC can also save GPS for often used locations), Captions, Keywords, ratings, and to copy metadata dates to file names and vice versa.

I also use exiftool to filter and fix some tags etc, if necessary.

- Matti

[Phil Harvey]

There are many topics in this forum with examples of how to space date/time of images by a fixed amount.  Search for "FileSequence DateTimeOriginal" (without the quotes) in the forum.

- Phil

[StarGeek]

**checks notes**

Original increment timestamp post, still works.

[tgji]

Thanks everyone! Several suggestions and old posts to get me started. Thank you!