All of my film, including negatives, is cut and mounted into Gepe slide mounts. The mounts hold it flat and make it much easier to scan and to file by subject and country.
Tina
On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 12:42 PM, David Dyer-Bennet <dd-b@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
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
Tina Manley
