Uploading pre-1970 photos to Google Photos

Question

The challenge:

• I have many scanned old photographs, dating back as far as 1900.
• I would like to organize the photos by date.
• I would like to keep a master copy of all images and meta-data on my own computer.
• I would like to share these with family and friends, without re-inventing too many wheels.
• Ideally, I would like to share on Google Photos.

I'm looking for clean general ideas: either APIs or existing tools that might help me. I'm open to general knock-on-the-side-of-my-head ideas, or tweaks to what I have already.

Details:

My key problem is that Google gets the date info from the EXIF data contained in each picture, and the EXIF format does not support dates before 1970.

But, I just discovered, I can edit photo date info in photos.google.com, and this supports dates going WAY back nearly 2000 years (back to year 100, to be exact)! The only missing feature seems to be a way to get these dates into the pictures without manually editing all the dates online.

I'm looking for a clean workflow. I have several partial pieces already, but none that fully satisfy me:

• I've written a tool that runs on my computer, and lets me create a metadata .json file for each picture to record interesting info, including creation date, and date range (e.g., I might know that a picture was taken during April 1975, or during the year 1935).
• I've entered correct dates for many of my old pictures, and plan to continue entering dates, captions, etc.
• I have a tool that can read these .json files and uploads pictures + meta-data to Flickr. It works well, but I'd rather have my photos on Google, given the popularity of the platform.

Some half-baked ideas:

1. Find a Picasa API that lets me upload creation date meta-data with pictures. (But, I don't think this exists)
2. Date compression: Before the mid-1970s, I don't care about exact picture dates and times. So, imagine a map of dates: all dates in 1900 become Jan 1, 1970; 1901 becomes January 2, 1970, ..., December 1972 becomes Dec 31, 1972, etc. This gets everything uploaded to Google, sorted properly. I can then select clusters of pictures and manually rename to the right date. It's clumsy, and certainly not idea. But, I only have a few thousand old photos, and no more than a few hundred distinct date ranges, so this is not totally crazed.

Still, I'd prefer a solution that requires no manual editing. I hope that I will have this photo collection for many years; probably for longer than Google Photos will remain available in its current form.

Answer 1

Per the comments, my question was based on incorrect premises.