The Universal Filename

Filenames of images (or anything for that matter) can be changed on a whim making it possible for two files to have the same name. But every file has unique information that can be the basis of a filename that never changes. This is simply the file’s creation date and time.

You can encode this name in any of several ways, and you can do it manually or by using an application such as Adobe Bridge with a batch-renaming utility built in.

By using the file’s creation date as the basis of a new filename you can ensure that every file will have a unique name that displays the sequence in which it was created.

For example, cameras typically create images with sequential filenames such as _DSCN00048, _DSCN00049, _DSCN00050, etc. However, if you use two cameras which use the same file naming convention, or reset the numbering on a single camera, it’s possible at some point to create two images with the same filename, and one might accidentally overwrite the other if they’re stored in the same location on your workstation. If you rename these files to something like _DSCN-YYMMDD-HHMMSS, where YYMMDD is the year, month and day and HHMMSS is the hour, minute and secon, you can create a unique name for every second of every day. That’s 86,400 unique names each day. So, unless you do a lot of sports and action photography where you shoot at several frames per second, you’ll have plenty of unique names regardless of how many cameras you use.

This also makes it easy to archive images based on their date of creation. You can easily search for all files containing -11 and archive them as “2011 Images”.

Separating elements with hyphens makes it easier to identify them Visually. For example, you might decide on a naming convention such as IMG-YYYY-MMDD-HHMMSS. This would make it easy to tell at a glance that the file “IMG-2010-1225-083025” was a photo taken on Christmas morning in 2010. If, like me, your legacy goes back before the year 2000, this is an excellent solution. Avoid using a “dot” (period, decimal point, etc.) in your filename as a separator. This special character should only be used to separate the file name from its extension. “/” and “:” should also be avoided, as operating systems use these characters to define folder structure.

If you’re using Adobe Bridge, the first step is to preserve the original filename by renaming the file to its current filename with the “preserve Current Filename” box checked. Then, you can easily change your naming convention on a whim, and also restore the original filename at any time if necessary. You can save these renaming conventions as presets for consistency.

You can also base the name on metadata stored internally within the file. The “Title” field is particularly good for this. If you have many images of the same subject, your naming scheme could be “Title-YYMMDD-HHMMSS” or “Title-YYYY-MMDD-HHMMS”. And you never have to worry about duplicate filenames, because Bridge appends these (1), (2), (3), etc.