Not having embedded shooting metadata is kinda annoying. There are ways around it, like getting stored data out of the camera, but I don't have the gear for that yet.
You must start with the files outside of Dropbox, otherwise exiftool will keep failing because Dropbox freaks out when the files disappears or is renamed quickly. You can use C:\Users\furinkan\Pictures\ for this
- Use ACDSee to fix rotations, this makes viewing much more convenient even before importing to Lightroom. Ctrl-Alt-Left/Right will do it, but you have to select save between every file
Batch rename the files to get them into chronological order, the original filenames are arbitrary anyway (but are usually <ROLL_ID><FRAME_ID>.jpg)
- Write a notes.txt for the photos, gather timestamps and GPS coordinates and shooting settings as much as possible
Tag dates and camera data with AnalogExif
- You can tag coarse timestamps now, which would be nice. At the very least, if the timestamps are all the same then Lightroom will resort to filename sorting once imported, which is probably what you want.
- Auto-tag exposure numbers as well, that's nice
- Tag GPS if it's convenient/possible, it's good to have that in the raws too. Find the location in Google Maps or other Lightroom files, then get the Degrees-Minutes-Seconds coordinates from it
The format for pasting into AnalogExif is like: -33°56'1.1804" +151°15'42.312"
- Tag the camera settings if you've got them (or can guess them)
Use exiftools on the raws to populate the correct date fields, otherwise LR will import using the file's scan date
exiftool -XMP-xmp:CreateDate= "-FileCreateDate<DateTimeOriginal" "-FileModifyDate<DateTimeOriginal" "-IFD0:ModifyDate<DateTimeOriginal" "-XMP-xmp:ModifyDate<DateTimeOriginal" *.jpg
- Import to Lightroom as normal
Make a new collection for the roll, eg: Film 2024-12-29 Fuji Velvia 50 [135]
Put an A/B/C/etc after the date if you have multiple rolls processed on the same date, eg: Film 2024-09-28A Kodak Gold 200 [120]
- Add files to existing collections as well, typically a cosplay set
- Add to the All Film Shots collection as well
- Fix rotations if needed
File ordering should already be correct thanks to the renaming and metadata entry in AnalogExif, but correct them in LR if needed
- It's common for rolls to be scanned in reverse shooting order, or for file mtimes to be out of sequence
- Adjust seconds/minutes to get all shots to the correct timestamp now
- Using Lightroom, move the files to the correct folder on disk if needed. But they should've imported correctly already
- Perform face tagging
- GPS tag as well if you haven't already
Now you can move the raws into Dropbox where they'll live, in Dropbox/Photos/0000_film_scans/
References
Commands
Inspect all info on a file, use this to figure out why LR is still seeing a current date on an old film scan.
exiftool -a -G1 -s c:\images\test.jpg