Problem with old dates in Picasaweb

This is a problem we run into again and again: photo management software can't handle photos from the past. In this case, I was trying to use Picasa Web albums to share photos of my Uncle from 1921-1942. The infuriating thing is that there is no way around this. Picasa only allows you to sort albums by "Album Date" or "Upload Date". There is no changing the date that you upload, and for old photos, it's impossible to set the correct album date.

The only workaround I can think of is to set all old albums to 1970, and then use an arbitrary mapping to get things in the right order. For example, use the month to indicate the first digit of the year, and the day to indicate the second. This would mean that 1921 would be represented as "February 1, 1970". February=2nd month, 1=day, together they mean "21". This will work, but what a pain!