How to attack problem of incorrect dates (my fault, not LR)

[STB]

Hello all,
I'm new to Lightroom but am already impressed by the program. It's going to help me fix the mess of my photo files.

Over the past 7 years I've taken a ton of photos but have made a mess of my file names and never had any serious (and useful) file naming conventions in places. Add in a couple of crashes where I panicked about the photos and a helping of some lazy housekeeping on my part and I've got giant mess of 40,000 photos. There are files names 1a, 1b,1zzz. There are files with the same name and different resolutions. There are sometimes 5 or 6 copies of the same file, some of which have the right capture date and some which don't.

Okay, so I'm not looking back and kicking myself about what I should have done back then. I'm just going forward. I got LR 3 and imported all my photos just fine. I did a first pass binning of photos into collections so I could just focus on the most important photos I need to get handle on at the moment and that would be the 10K photos of my garden conversion to wildlife habitat plus garden critters.

Many photos do not have the correct capture date. I think that's because of being edited (correct me if I'm wrong) in Paint Shop Pro (an old version). Between the new camera and LR, I've been reading so many things that I can't remember where I read what exactly. Again, I can't worry about the past, I'm just trying to figure out how to get to where I want to be with the least amount of time or frustration or steps or the best combination of it all.

I am building a website for my habitat garden so it is important for me to be able to document the steps we went through, removing concrete, taking out the lawn, etc, with photos. Also to document the growth of the garden over time.

What I was first going to do, before I figured this out, was to sort through the collection I have for say, "water features" and sort them by capture date. Then go through them, find a copy of the largest file which is usually the original file, keep that one and put a red label on all the other copies to delete. (I'm not worried about any edits I might have done since I wasn't very good at PP and those things had probably already been posted on my blog or Facebook or sent to my mom.)

But then I realized that sometimes what I thought was the original file, or what was the largest file, did not have the correct capture date on it. I can verify this by going to the file in Explorer and seeing that other files around it have a different correct capture date.

I'm okay with going in and editing the capture date or putting the date elsewhere in the file I'm just not sure the best way to do this.

The thought I had tonight was that if I red labeled all the ones I wanted to delete and then showed the collection of everything that DIDN'T have a red label on it, I could do a quick scan for any dates I have to change. (I'm showing the capture date on the grid.)

But I can't figure out how to show everything in a collection without a label. Is that possible and if so how?

Is there another way to attack this situation?

I realize this is a big chore that is just going to take time which is why I want to make a plan first before diving in.

If you've read this far, thanks so much!

[zona5101]

library --> filter by color --> no color.

It's easier to use the "x" key to mark the photo for deletion if that's what you think you are going to do with it. It will gray out the photo then when you want you can delete the photos [Photo -->delete rejected photos] you'll have a chance to review what is to be deleted. Then you can either remove them from the catalog or delete them from the disk.

You can change the capture date. In the library module click on the bullet list icon to the right of "Capture time" under the metadata section. You can select one or more images and assign a new date.

[STB]

Zona, yes, I agree it is easier to X the photos very quickly however the flags don't travel outside of collections, which is where I am working at this time. If I choose delete photos from inside the collection it only removes them from the collection, not from the disk which is what I want. So what I do is zip through and X everything, then filter on that, turn them all red so I can see them from the top level.

I can change the capture date on multiple images at once? Sweet. That will help a lot. Thank you!