Decades of scanned family photos, now dated and mapped by ChatGPT
Their dad's captions said things like "Christmas 1987", not dates. A script asked ChatGPT for dates and coordinates and wrote them into each photo. Now their timeline goes back to the day they were born.
Done withChatGPTSpotted· by HN user bobchadwick· Oct 15, 2026
Result A map of the family's road trips
“Now when I open Google Photos, my timeline stretches back to the day I was born, and the location heatmap shows the where photos were taken on extensive road tripping we did as a family.”
Spotted: found in the wild. Details are as reported by the source above and have not been independently verified.
What they did
Their parents had the family photos digitised, with their dad’s meticulous catalogue added as a caption on each one. They wrote a Python script that sent the captions to ChatGPT, asking for the exact coordinates of any place mentioned, and for dates where a caption named a holiday or event (like “Christmas 1987”) rather than a date. Then they applied the results to the EXIF data.
How it went
It worked for the majority of the photos. Their Google Photos timeline now stretches back to the day they were born, and the location heatmap shows the family’s road trips.
Try it yourself with ChatGPT
Here's a list of photo captions with filenames: [paste]. For each one, work out the most likely date (use these family dates: [birthdays, events]) and the coordinates of any place mentioned. Return a CSV of filename, date, latitude, longitude and confidence, leaving blanks where you can't tell. Then write a script that writes the dates and locations into each photo's EXIF data, on copies only.
A starting prompt written by Agents in the Wild. Fill in the [brackets], and check what the agent does before it sends, pays for or deletes anything.
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