Having seen various discussions about the 31 character limit for filenames, I thought I'd share a useful strategy for gaining an extra few characters if needed (and saving some keyboard and finger wear and tear along the way).

As a programmer in a past life I often found that I had some sort of character limit to work with. Invariably I would shorted words by removing the vowels and leaving only the constanants. Taking Peter's example of appending "Master" to master deriviative files and an example of a four character limit, I would remove 'a' and 'e' to leave Mstr. In context still easily readible with less decoding than a single 'M'.

"Derivative" in six letters becomes "Drvtve" and shows that once you've removed enough vowels you can leave the rest (the 'e' on the end). With six letters "Master" wouldn't be shortened at all i.e., only remove enough vowels to fit within the limit.

This strategy saves letters and keeps things understandable without the need for a set of encoded letters.

If this works for you or you do something similar, please share.

David

HI Geoff,

Just noted your earlier comment about no thumbnails for TIFF and PSD files and it triggered a thought. I recently also imported a large number of files, many of which were TIFFs. I can only speak to those. Tiff files which were created with ZIP compression could not be read by iView. They loaded but all I saw was a default icon and no thumbnail. Converting them to LZW compression or PSD format worked.

With the PSD's I'd check if you have maximum backward compatibility checked.

Hope this helps,

David

The manual is specific but from memory, it takes in order of preference,

• Date Created
• Modified Date
• Created Date

That will explain why it's taking modified in preference to created. If they are JPEG files, look at one of the EXIF modification tools. Most will allow you to set the date you require. On the other hand, setting Date Created to the date you require is the solution I'd take. Trust the content management system's view of things rather than what's in the file.

David

Hi Mark,

I'm a new iView user myself but yesterday remembered seeing a number of posts in this forum which explain that iView locks up when it gets to about 2gb of catalogue file. Perhaps that's what you're experiencing. Have a good search through the forums.

David

Thanks Marc,

A further benefit of storing the date in the catalog system is that as a more accurate date is found, it can be recognised without having to update the file name.

Storing circa. January 1, 2007 in the headling or caption might be another option. A search for "circa" then brings up all photos which need another look as part of a project to garner better dates.

Why do all this? For the generations to come.

David

I have a reasonable number of images with no known date. I'd like to be able to track them in iView using the Date Finder grouping, yet need some strategy to identify which dates are uncertain. It may very well be that by writing my thoughts down here I'll answer my own question 

At the file level naming level those files with unknown dates have 0's placed where the year, month and day would normally be. For example, if I know the date to be April 2006 but not the precise day, the file name would include 20060400 (trailing 00 indicated day unknown). Or maybe it's a birthday shot so I can ascertain the day and month but not the year. It would then be 00000405.

0000 is not a date that one can enter into iView (or any other computer date). It's thrown out as invalid, just as the 42nd of the 19 month would be.

This is a problem because I'd like to be at least able to have something in April 2006 show up when April 2006 as a whole is seen in the date finder. iView requires a day in the date created field. I don't have one.

I have a lot of old family photos where only the year is known at a best guess. Also several hundred photos of my daughter at pre-school kindly taken by her carers. All digital but they had no idea on setting camera dates. Most of the photos are EXIF dated from before I was born! In this case I know the year and can guess the season by her size and clothing.

Do you:

• assign a default day in each month, month in each year or year to indicate you don't know and hope at the time you can identify which dates are real and which aren't
• manager your own date created tree with a category set
  
• leave the date as imported and just rely on file naming, description
• or, a combination of the above

Thanks,

David