Bluebonnet Studios

Lightroom Plugins

Check Capture Year vs Folder

When the folder and the capture date disagree

Private release Version 2.1.1 · Plugin · macOS

If your photographs live in folders named by year, the folder is a second opinion on when each one was taken. This compares the two and gathers every disagreement into collections, without changing a single capture date.

What it checks

Select photographs and run Library > Plug-in Extras > Check Capture Year vs Folder. Each photograph’s capture year is compared with the folder it sits in, below a root you choose: a folder named Photos by default, or an exact path. Photos/1993, Photos/1990s and Photos/1990s/1993 are all recognised, and optionally folders such as 1993 Vacation. A month check for YYYY-MM folders and a tolerance of up to a week around New Year are both available.

Results go into one collection set the plugin owns: a collection for each kind of mismatch, such as Folder 1993 – Metadata 1995, and others for photographs with no capture date, outside the root, or in a folder it could not interpret.

Careful about scope

Instead of

Treating no selection as the whole catalog. When nothing is selected, Lightroom hands a plugin every photograph in the filmstrip. This one notices and stops, and it asks you to confirm the count before it starts.

Updating results as it goes. Results change only after a complete scan, in one catalog operation; cancel, or hit an error, and they stay exactly as they were. Photographs from earlier scans keep their results, so a large library can be worked through a folder at a time.

What it never changes

Capture dates, or any other metadata. Dates are read from the raw metadata fields, never parsed from locale-formatted display strings, and the only things written are the plugin’s own collections. A collection set with the same name that the plugin did not create is left alone.

Status, stated plainly

Pure Lua with no native helper, written for Lightroom Classic on both macOS and Windows against SDK 12 with a minimum of SDK 10. It has been tested in Lightroom Classic on a Mac, and its logic is also covered by automated tests that run outside Lightroom. It has not yet been tested on Windows.

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