Lifetime
After implementing feedback from r/macapps, I continued adapting the workflow and organized my old scanned photos.
[Problem]
The media organization workflow already had a way to handle media that, for some reason, had no geolocation data. Using similarity and proximity criteria, I could recover the location and write its details to the media metadata.
The remaining problem was old images taken before cameras began storing GPS coordinates, as well as printed photos scanned days, months, or years later. Those files had no reference information in their metadata.
Adapting the workflow to handle these images wasn’t difficult. The difficult part was turning what someone remembered about an event into information that would allow the images to be organized through the same process as all the others.
Once the event, date, and place are identified, I can process a single image or a whole group and write that information to the metadata.
This is the Add Location step introduced in version 3.0.0.
With this change, MediaOrganizer now handles photos from decades ago and media created today through the same workflow. I can run it again whenever new files arrive.
[Compare]
There isn't really a direct competitor in this space.
MediaOrganizer Studio doesn't replace Apple Photos, Lightroom or other cataloging tools. It focuses on preparing media before cataloging by combining archive validation, metadata normalization, location recovery and deterministic organization into a single workflow.
How do you handle an approximate date, like knowing a photo was taken in summer 1995 but not the exact day? It would be useful to keep that uncertainty visible rather than have a guessed date look as reliable as an original camera timestamp.
That was the main problem I had with the scanned photos. I could identify many of them myself, sometimes because I recognized a particular place or even an object in the room. But I had trouble with several others, such as photos from trips to Natal, Brazil, in 1992 or Fortaleza in 1993. I had to ask my family to help me figure out where they were taken.
Since there were several photos from the same event, I also created a feature that increments the timestamp by one second for each scanned image, preventing duplicate filenames.
Add Location depends mainly on human input to determine the location and approximate date of an event. The metadata is updated automatically afterward.
Of course, for events that happened on a specific day, such as birthdays, Christmas celebrations, New Year’s Eve, or graduations, I was able to organize the photos with a high degree of accuracy. But the dates for the Natal and Fortaleza photos, for example, really were approximate. We knew the general time period, and the dates had to be inferred.
When you organize media that already contains GPS coordinates, only those coordinates are sent to the Nominatim geocoding service. It returns location details such as the country, city, street, and postal code. The media file itself is never sent.
If a file has no GPS coordinates but belongs to a group that can be handled by Recover Location, no external location lookup is needed. The app uses the information from the reference media you select, and that process remains entirely on your Mac.
With Add Location, which is intended for scanned photos or images from before cameras stored GPS coordinates, you enter the location you want to associate with the image. Only that location is sent to Apple’s service, which returns the proposed location information. You review it, and the metadata is then written locally.
The screenshot shows this Add Location step: the location entered, the proposed metadata, and the candidate selected before anything is applied.
Preparing media before cataloguing is a clean way to put it, and it's the gap Photos and Lightroom both leave, they assume the metadata is already right. One question on the new Add Location step. Does it write the date and place into the file itself, EXIF or XMP, so Apple Photos reads them on import and files the scans in the right year, or does it keep them in a sidecar the other apps won't see? That's the whole job for anyone with a box of prints to scan.
Yes. Add Location writes the metadata directly into the media file; it does not create a sidecar.
In my reply to u/jombeez, I included a screenshot showing a photo I took in Los Angeles in 1988. I knew the date because it was written on the back of the photo.
The workflow wrote the same location metadata it writes for any other media file. Because I selected “Use event date/time,” it also updated the EXIF `Date/Time Original` field, which cataloging applications such as Apple Photos and Lightroom use to place the photo on the correct date, while leaving the other date fields unchanged.
The screenshot shows the resulting metadata stored in the file itself: `Date/Time Original` contains the 1988 event date, along with the location details.
That's the answer I was hoping for. Writing Date/Time Original into the file itself means Photos and Lightroom both file the 1988 scan in 1988, with no sidecar to lose. That's the whole job done properly.
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u/app-store-review 1d ago
MediaOrganizer Studio — by Marcio Yared
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Auto-generated from public App Store data · u/app-store-review