Help with organizing a LARGE library of scanned photos!

[SuneA]

Hi all!
I've manually scanned almost all of my familys photos (dating back to 1960) and it has been a heck of a job. Over 10 000 images..
These are of course quite stripped of metadata that Lightroom needs to be able to let me browse them after date or description.
How can I get ExifTool to help me with the following;

The images are in folders named in the following way
-------------------------------------------------------
1974 - Vacation to Germany - #234\
1975-01-31 - Birth of Greg\
177 - Wedding - #345 #546\
1980-(Unknown) - Sune learns to ride the bicycle\

As you can see I do not always have a precise date and I do not always have the #(number). The #(number) is simply a reference to the original. Be it a binder, an envelope or similar.

What I would like to do
---------------------------
1. I would like to set the date (as much/little precise data there is) for the image (date taken?) so it can be sorted in Lightroom or other imaging software.
2. Metadata that shows the image has been scanned, when and by whom
3. Metadata that includes the #(number) so it can be referenced back to the source
4, Metadata that includes the description given in the folder name so I can search in Lightroom
5. Advice on how to sort when I do not know the precise date but "autumn, spring" or similar"..
6. Any other input is greatly appreciated!

(I am of course willing and able to do some manual cleaning of the directory names if needed!!)

Any help with this would be GREATLY appreciated as this has been driving me nuts for quite some time. All the photos are "dead data" right now..
Donation will of course be given!

Have a great week everybody! I will anxiously wait for any comments:)

[Phil Harvey]

This is all of course possible, but how much you can automate depends on exactly what you want to do.

First, since the file creation date is likely the scan date, and you did all the scanning, I would suggest this:

exiftool "-createdate<filecreatedate" "-creator=YOUR NAME" DIR

where DIR is the root directory.

As far as storing the partial date/time and #number, first you need to decide where you want to put them.  Then it may be best to create a user-defined tag to do the reformatting that you require (unless it is simple enough to put in an advanced formatting expression).

- Phil