My dad was a prolific family photographer when I was growing up (which I guess we all are now, with our phones). He also meticulously cataloged the photos and used a spreadsheet (first created on our Compaq Portable!) to store "metadata" about them, such as descriptions, dates, people in the photos, etc. A few years back, as family Christmas presents, my parents had the photos digitized, and had someone add the "metadata" as a caption on every photo.

This led to the first AI-related project I undertook that really blew my mind. I wrote a python script that read the captions, then sent them to ChatGPT with a prompt that asked it to get the exact coordinates of any locations mentioned, and to get dates for captions that mentioned a holiday or other even, but not a date, e.g.: "Christmas 1987," my birthday, which I included in the prompt, etc. I was then able to apply the results to the exif data the majority of the photos.

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.

I created a simple app of known family geo spots, and manually geo tagged all my family's photos (8000). Did the exact same thing and gave it to my parents as a Christmas gift. It's all in Immich and the map is amazing.

I'm trying to help others get this same experience of enjoying their photos they grew up with; it's so easy to find a picture of me when I was 4 years old to compare against my kid today.