Cog & Feather

Hey guys!

First blog post, and I figured I share how I manage my film scans in Lightroom. In Lightroom CC, the ability to manipulate rolls you import en masse are quite spartan, and while better in Lightroom Classic, it's still quite challenging. I had also noticed that even after modifying dates by hand to squash them by hand, the ordering was off on mobile vs on the desktop. This for me was deal breaking.

It's always going to be a compromise - In EXIF, there are fields for camera and lenses, but nothing for film. And not every place you put data will show up in Lightroom on the Info sidebar. It's a digital world now, and things aren't going to work out perfectly.

So I've reached a compromise - The aim is to do a little pre-processing so that when I import the photos, my photos are both tagged, and show up in the correct order.

The first item of business is documenting what we took the images with. My feeling is that the most important field is the emulsion, then the camera used, and then if documented, the lens. I do not document rigorously, the lens, and rarely document exposure settings. The problem is, in a film scanning workflow, I believe that the scanner is also important to note. This will help me document what images I'd like to target for rescans, for instance. Rather than overwrite the scanner data, or move it to a secondary field, I have decided to leave the scanner’s default EXIF in place, but move the emulsion, camera, and lens into a semicolon delimited field in the description fields. You may have your own ideas about this and you can definitely put the data where you want, but I will be describing exactly what I do.

I could see, for example, writing the camera and lens to their respective EXIF fields, then moving the scanner info to the description. But I feel that since the scanner is the last capture in the flow, to leave that information intact.

The second item to address is that the capture data of the scanner data does not reflect the film capture dates. Rather than document all capture times of my shots, I have decided to just document the date of the first shot on the roll. I default the time to midnight, and for each extra roll I shoot in a day, I add an hour. I have never come close to shooting more than 23 rolls of film in a day.

The problem of doing this in Lightroom, especially in CC, where batch modification capabilities are extremely limited, is that Lightroom has its own mind about how to order photos. If you have 2 photos on 9/1/19 00:00:00, they will sometimes not show up in the order you have expected them to. The solution here is to add a sequence number, which is an EXIF field used to sequence quick burst of photos, for example, in bracketing. Lightroom will use this sequence number and respect the relative ordering when the dates collide.

So how does one actually do this? I acknowledge there's some legwork you could do in your scanning software, but I also opt for lab scans frequently, and so lose control in those cases. I was talking to my buddy Tim and he had mentioned he was using a UI tool called AnalogExif, which is cool and handles batch editing and gear profiles that you can setup, but I’m a bit more low level and just use ExifTool. For a UI, there's also a Lightroom plugin called Lenstagger which wraps ExifTool, but I have not personally experimented with it as of yet.

Just a disclaimer that I may be getting a little technical for some. I work on a Mac, so these instructions are specific to doing this in OSX. But regardless, I hope you are able to take what you want out of what I have figured out for myself and find what works for you.

#1 - Install ExifTool. Instructions are available on the site.

#2 - Put this in ~/.ExifTool_config as a shortcut for all caption related fields. I have determined these fields by looking at what Lightroom CC writes to after modifying a caption and exporting back out to jpg.

%Image::ExifTool::UserDefined::Shortcuts = (    AllCaptions => ['ImageDescription', 'Caption-Abstract', 'Description'])

#3 - I will typically collect a few rolls and then write a script to do them all en-masse, but in general, for each roll you’d want to update the dates, your caption, and update sequence number based off your scanned filename. You’ll want each roll of film in its own directory and as usually the case anyway, the filename should end in two digits.

If your filenames don’t start end with two digits before the ‘.jpg’, you can add them pretty easily by running:

count=1; for i in `ls`; do newfilename=`echo $i | sed s/\.jpg//g`-$count.jpg; echo $newfilename; mv $i $newfilename; count=$((count+1)); done

Then all you gotta do is run in the directory of your roll of scans, with caption and date modified in the following line:

for i in `ls | grep -i "\.jpg$"`; do exiftool $i -AllCaptions=‘INSERT_CAPTION_HERE’ -AllDates='2019:09:01 00:00:00' -SequenceNumber=`echo $i | sed -e s/[^0-9]//g | grep -o '..$'`; echo $i; done;

Per before, my own personal caption scheme would result in something like "Kodak Portra 160; Nikon FM2n; Nikon AF 50mm 1.8D"

Of note, be aware this will write your originals to new files suffixed with ‘original’ - once you’re sure you got what you wanted, then delete these files. If you're feeling bolder, you could add the -overwrite_original flag to the call. A variation of this could be to write the caption based off of the enclosing folder’s name, but I’ll leave that for an exercise to figure out. You’d just replace your captions with a back-tick’d insert of pwd piped into sed.

#4 - Import into Lightroom, and voila.

Thanks for reading. Til next time!

Addendum: While this fixed issues I had with Lightroom Mobile vs CC on the desktop, I noticed recently that Lightroom on the web doesn’t show the same ordering even after this post processing as Classic, CC, and mobile. This is annoying and I suspect that perhaps it isn’t respecting the sequence number in EXIF. This is frustrating but at the very least, mobile and desktop are working properly for me which is workable until Adobe fixes the inconsistencies between the platforms.