The first question is, what do you need to accomplish with the image naming conventions? I established my conventions while shooting rolls of film, and then modified them some, and then adapted them to digital, so there's a lot of history in why I do what I do. With film, it wasn't an option to file by location or subject (I wasn't willing to break up rolls of film, especially not negatives where cutting them into very short strips made them difficult to handle). Slides could I suppose have been filed by subject -- if I never had more than one subject in a photo. Since I very frequently had multiple people plus a building or landscape feature, filing by subject wasn't a viable choice for me. So, I ended up filing simply sequentially, basically by "accession number" (an arbitrary number assigned to each roll of film; I call them "ddb numbers" because they're of the form "ddb 301"). This plus the negative number from the film edge gives me a unique and reasonably compact identifier for each photo. I can then use this on index cards or in databases to index in more detail, without limitations on how many categories any given photo can be in. As I got less organized (and shot more), and started doing more color (which went to labs rather than through my own darkroom), I changed to using a date code rather than a sequential number. This means I didn't have to have yesterday fully under control before I could start today, which was darned useful sometimes. In this period I identify rolls (or digital sessions; photos taken at the same time and place) as "ddb 20130621", my initials plus the data in ISO format. I then add a session code, and end with the shot number (pre-printed negative number for film, sequential number in the session for digital). So an individual digital shot from a big day of Roller Derby shooting might be "ddb 20130216 010-263-orig.nef" (I include the "-orig" only in actual camera originals, which means I have to rename files rendered from that original to get rid of it). I've sometimes wondered if just leaving the files named the way they come out of the camera might be easier and no worse. However, I fairly often merge files from multiple cameras into one session, sorting by timestamp so the photos are roughly in the order shot. And you have to go somewhat beyond just the camera name, since those roll over every 10k shots or something. -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
