Digikam as archive of historical photos

[George Koulomzin]

Some more possibilities:

 1. A four dimensional space created by 4 tags, each with a well known
    range of values:
     1. /century/  values: (1700,1800,1900,2000)
     2. /decade/ values (00,10,20,30,40,50,60,70,80,90)
     3. /year/ values (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9)
     4. /month / values (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12)

        Assigning all four to a photo places it within a month.
        Assigning 1,2&2 places it within a year
        Assigning 1&2 only places a photo with a decade
        To search, specify the precision you want.  You may have to do a
        couple of queries to span multiple adjacent intervals, or you
        could add additional dimensions, e.g. quarter century.
        This is not exactly what you want, but would it be close enough?
 2. Another approach, conceptually similar to the above, but maybe
    easier to use:
     1. By convention, a photo is placed within a month, year, decade
        and century as above.  This is encoded in a dedicated tag e.g.
        /approximateDate/.  Assume a date format <YYYYMMDD>.   You would
        assign values to this tag expressing as much as you know about
        the date to the photo, e.g. <18??????> or <181?????> or
        <190212??>.  You would search by looking for values which
        contain "<1810", or "<194506".  The "<" and ">" prevent
        confusing 18 hundreds with 18th of the month.
        An advantage of this approach is that the assigned tag could
        contain multiple values, e.g. "<194506,<194507" for a photo
        which is believed to have been taken in June or July of 1945.
 3. Write SQL queries outside of digikam, and use the results to find
    the specific photos in digikam.  That would be the most powerful
    approach, but would not be a purely digikam solution.

On 1/24/2026 10:25 AM, Hanspeter Halle 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?
>
-- 
George Koulomzin
7 Bridge Hill Lane,
PO Box 781
Bridgehampton, NY, 11932
(m) 914-393-6179
(h) 631-537-4956
George at Koulomzin.com
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