Short and Sweet

I’ve stopped naming and re-naming files. From now on, I let Adobe Bridge do it for me.

In addition to my photography, I maintain a library of reference images; cameras, lenses, other artists’ work, etc. I usually give these descriptive names, rather than the “frame number“ labeling convention of cameras. And I usually wind up making them too long, incorporating too much descriptive information. In the past, I have appending this name with a manually generated sequence number, 001, 002, 003, etc. But a recent need to rename some files has changed all that.

From now on, when I download and tag images of products, I simply put the make and model number in the IPTC “Title” field. In the case of artwork, I put the artist’s name in the “Creator” field, and the title of the artwork in the “Title” field. Then, I let Adobe Bridge use these fields to generate unique filenames. Any additional information is added not to the filename, but as keywords or other metadata.

I used to put thought to how I would like them ordered, and then append them with a three-digit sequence number. The only problem with this is that it requires thought, and that if I add new items I may feel the need to re-sequence the files. All this thinking and re-sequencing requires time. And when you’re as busy as I am, time is a luxury you don’t have. So, I’m not playing this game anymore. I now append the “Title” field with a logical sequence number, one that never changes. The time of creation. When used with the title field, HHMMSS creates a unique filename 99% of the time. And the times that it doesn’t are usually in the case of a duplicate image. I like that.

Even if duplicate filenames are named differently, all you have to do is sort by date created, and they will show up along side one another. This makes it easy to manage files. For files that don’t require a descriptive filename, I use “IMG_” followed by the creation year, month and day, and hours, minutes, seconds (IMG_YYYY-MMDD-HHMMSS). This generates a unique filename based on absolute chronological order that is easy to decipher in a file listing. It also makes archiving the files much easier; sort by filename, and burn enough files to fill a disk. The sequence of the volumes will mirror the sequence of the file creation dates.