Update date and time of photos taken by placing photos on a timeline and interpolating accordingly

Question

Sometimes I stumble upon a folder of old photos that don't have EXIF information and therefore have not date/timestamp of when the photos were taken.

I can go through them one by one and set an estimated datetime based on my recollection, but this is tedious to do for hundreds of photos.

I am looking for a GUI application that would allow me to select groups of photos and place them on a timeline w.r.t. to each other, after which the application interpolates the timestamp for the photos and updates their EXIF datetime.

Usage examples:

• I would select 10 photos, place them at the timeline position 05-11-2003 11:00 and the application would assume these were all taken at 11:00 on that day
• I would select another set of 20 photos of which I know they were taken in the evening of 06-11-2003 between 20:00 and 23:00. The application interpolates the datetime for these 20 photos between 06-11-2003 20:00 and 06-11-2003 23:00.

I prefer something for Mac OS and gratis, but it's not a hard requirement, I am also interested in recommendations that fall outside of these preferences.

Answer 1

I found a command line solution that uses exiftool and Python to more or less do what I was looking for. From the README:

This script takes a list of photos (in a certain order), sets their EXIF capture date to a pre-defined date and "spreads" the capture time over the day between the times specified.
Useful when you have received a bunch of photos through some messaging service that strips EXIF data. If you know the date on which the photos were taken and can approximate the order of them, you can let this script come up with a fitting capture date and time.