Spring may have arrived in London last week, blossom is on the trees, the air is cleaner and there are no crowds. It would be great to go out and take some pictures. But not with the Coronavirus outbreak.

For the last year I’ve been posting new photos to my Instagram page. It’s no big deal, sometimes it’s nice to get feedback, and it’s a habit that I quite like – hell, now we all need some social interaction!

But without new pictures, what to do? One idea was to look back a year in Lightroom, which is easy enough since I store my photos in folders for each day. But if I didn’t shoot anything on this day last year, have I really got the patience to look back year after year?

Sadly Lightroom doesn’t make it easy. One can certainly do it using the Library Filter to filter by date, but I’ve got photos going back 30+ years and finding all the March 20s means a lot of clicking. There’s a similar problem with smart collections – you have to type in each date.

And that’s what led me to this idea – a script that creates a smart collection for the same date for previous years. So it creates a smart collection as below. Run it tomorrow and it’ll find everything from March 21.

Installation instructions are in the start of the file. The script goes back 25 years but you can change that if you wish, and I suspect it might be useful for lots of other purposes – birthdays, anniversaries. But you’ll have to hack it for yourself!