I’m hoping for a bit of interaction here guys and gals.
I was just about to rename all 698 (yes I made an error in my original count) photos from yesterday’s Flickr walk when I decided to put some real thought behind it.
As prolific shooters, some of you must be facing the same issue I am having, that being how do you name your mountains of images for reasonably easy retrieval and archiving? Mike, for instance, has taken over 18,000 photos in the two years he has had his 350D
For the last three months I have been using the following system:
RXA_{YY}{MM}{DD}_####.{ext}
Where:
- {YY} is a two figure representation of the year the photograph was taken
- {MM} is a two figure representation of the month the photograph was taken
- {DD} is a two figure representation of the day the photograph was taken
- #### is the image number for the day
- {ext} is the file extension
Note: In case you were getting worried about the level of detail I record when out photographing stuff, the image date and time as well as many other factors like focal length, shutter speed and aperture used is recorded automatically by the camera each time a photograph is taken and stored within the file. Most photo software retrieves and displays this information without prompting.
Now initially I thought that using four figures for the sequence was ridiculous but if you think about it, if we had started shooting at 5 am to get the sunrise and I had more cards on me (I’m still missing a 2Gb card somewhere???) my 698 yesterday images could easily have crossed the 1000 mark.
Most photo sorting/editing applications have an easy way of batch renaming files so I am not actually doing this individually. I’m not THAT stupid.
This system has worked reasonably well for me but I needed something more specific in case I took part in multiple shoots in one day and downloaded the images during multiple sittings during the day. The chance of ignoring a warning and overwriting files is quite high.
So this afternoon I came up with this new method:
RXA_{YY}{MM}{DD}_{HH}{mm}{SS}.{ext}
Where:
- {HH} is a two figure representation of the hour the photograph was taken
- {mm} is a two figure representation of the minute the photograph was taken
- {DD} is a two figure representation of the second the photograph was taken
At first I thought this would work. Luckily before I put it in to practice I realised a possible stumbling block in my plan. Has anyone else guessed it? Like most of my photographer friends, I have a camera that is capable of shooting in burst mode. For the uninitiated, that means that as you continue to hold down the shutter and the camera will take photographs until you release your finger, the card runs out or most likely the camera’s internal buffer is filled. A bit like a machine gun really.
Now my main camera (I normally take two out on a shoot) is capable of taking 5 frames per second. The camera I have my eye on for my next upgrade, goes up to 6.5 frames per second. So in theory, my process above would not work and could possibly end up with horrendous file names with (copy 1) etc on the end. I decided to bite the bullet and give it a go anyway and hope that the clever people at Adobe had put some thought into this.
It appears that they have. Any images taken in the same second have -2, -3, -4 (in one case) appended to the second. So to take an actual image filename example from yesterday, an example filename for all my photos now reads:
RXA_070825_132354-3.CRW
This photo was taken by me (RXA) on the 25th of August, 2007 (070825) at 1.23.54 in the afternoon. This is in fact the third photograph to be taken that second as indicated by the -3. The file extension is .CRW (Canon RAW).
This method seems to work and is quite acceptable. I have applied it to the other 1000 or so images on my hard drive and the system seems foolproof. For how long, we will have to see.
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