In my renaming template the location will also be found in IPTC metadata fields and probably also reflected in keywords (keywords are also part of IPTC metadata). The date is obviously part of the EXIF metadata of any digital image. In renaming one images it is very likely that all the information (if it is to useful of course) is probably duplicated elsewhere. An obvious application of redundancy is to have several back-ups of ones images. A key, but often misunderstood, precept of digital asset management is redundancy.
Hopefully, over time, these servers will start running systems software that support less onerous file naming conventions.Įven if you do not currently anticipate sending images over the internet I would suggest you strongly consider sticking to the conventions mentioned above.įile renaming is a small but important part of what is called digital asset management.
I still make this recommendation because, although neither OS X nor current Windows environments are limited in this way the situation is much more varied in the internet world where most of the servers are running Unix or variants thereof. Try to keep the entire filename to 31 characters including the suffix (.JPEg or. Strange things can happen to filenames if there are spaces in the filename. There should never be any spaces in filenames either. there is no place for any other special characters in filenames, since how different operating systems handle these characters in filenames is not uniform. Rules for renaming include using only digits, letter, dashes, underscores, and fullstops. Whatever you decide to use make sure that is sensible and meaningful. Using location for the custom text may make no sense for your genre of photography. It also guarantees every filename is unique but easily understood by a human. This system of file renaming is simple, repeatable, and scalable. The date is the first eight characters, the sequence number the last four digits, and the location sits in the middle. So a file renamed by myself looks something like this: 20160118-great_sandy_np-0001.CR2. I do a lot of outdoor photography so the custom text I enter happens to be the location of the shoot. What to enter is probably the biggest decision. If you really shoot more than this on a daily basis then make it a five-digit sequence. Combined with the date information above this gives 10 000 images per day (0001 to 9999). Including the time I regard as a rare edge case.Įnd with a four-digit sequence number. Almost all photographers do not need to include the time as well. Doing this will guarantee that that files will list chronologically. Start with the date in this format YYYYMMDD. In fact, a camera-generated filename is just a randomly-generated name consisting of digits and letters, and is neither meaningful, for a human, nor unique and so, duplication is possible. Some people get very excited about preserving the original, camera-generated filename, but unless there is some forensic auditing that is required then there really is not a good reason to preserve the camera-generated filename. If one is going to go to the trouble of renaming then at least make sure the result is meaningful to you. Meaningful names: A filename like 47qR45.JPEG may be unique, and prevent duplicates, but it is meaningless to a human being. If you have a renaming strategy that guarantees that each filename is, in fact, unique, then the situation outlined above just cannot occur. However, what happens if that file accidentally ends up in the same folder as the first MyDogSpot.JPEG? Hopefully both the OS and whatever application realise that they are actually two unique files but they may not - in which case unless you happen to have your wits about you, you may, in fact, allow one file to be overwritten by the other. Unique filenames - although a filename is more than just MyDogSpot.JPG, it actually includes the entire root, like this C:\My Pictures/2015/Birthday/MyDogSpot.JPEG, so having another image file of the same name but in a different folder means that the operating system and other applications will realise the two files are different. If, as Johan correctly suggests, that filenames are not the way to search for an image what is the point of renaming a file? Johan is correct however, trying to decide exactly what is useful for a purpose is not necessarily that easy.