Digikam as archive of historical photos

[Carol C. Kankelborg]

I have some old family photos (and many more I want to add) with the same problem. When I do not know the exact date, I use the convention of a timestamp of 00:00:00. If I only know the year, I make month/day be Jan. 1, and if I don’t know the day of the month, I set it to the 1st. I will often add something in the comments to indicate that the date is approximate. 

I have not done this (because I only just thought of it), but you could create a tag for “Date-Approx” to further clarify that the date field is only an estimate.

I can see the value of being able to enter a date window for photos where that information is not known (e.g. a range of years, range of months, range of days in the month). It would also be nice to have set year, month, or day to  “unknown” instead of what I do. It would be clearer that the photo was not taken on Jan. 1, but some unknown day of the year. An unknown year would be tricky — it would be useless to sort the photos by year. 

As for having a search that is wider than what you want, it seems like you could simply expand the window yourself when you search. 

I’m curious if anyone has a different system that works for them for these situations.

Carol


> On Jan 24, 2026, at 08:25, Hanspeter Halle <hphalle at t-online.de> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> we want to used digikam for an archive of historical photos. For these an exact date can seldomly be given, only a time range can be guessed. It would be great, if this range A) could be specified in a compatible way and B) could be taken into account in searches. For example when searching for photos between 1950 and 1959 we would like to find those with a time range of 1945-1955 and those with 1958-1962. Has anybody a solution for this?