Feedback on naming scheme

[David Burren]

The naming scheme I've been using since the late 90's has been: YYYYMMDDHHMM_ID.ext

I notice some people are using YY instead of YYYY but I still have useful images from last millenium in my catalogs, so I've resisted the temptation to shorten names by two digits so far...

Early on I looked at using the subsec EXIF times to ensure the files were in sequence, but dropped that with the realisation that if we're importing the names in lexigraphical order from the camera they'll be in order anyway.  As long as the "ID" field is allocated and sorted properly we can maintain the order.

In my system the "ID" is a unique ID.  Not derived from the camera's idea of image number, not derived from a per-day counter, but allocated from a global counter (in a SQL database).  In fact it's the concatenation of a per-machine ID and the counter (which is kept locally on each machine) so images can be imported on separate machines (e.g. laptops) and merged later without having conflicting IDs.  The IDs will only be unique if the machine IDs are unique, but I only expect the IDs to be unique within my own organisation's database.
The image ID is inserted into the metadata's Title field as well as being used in the filename.  Existing Titles are honoured as previously-allocated IDs rather than allocating new ones.  An AppleScript inside iView will allocate new IDs to non-camera files (e.g. Photoshop creations).

I don't bother inserting things like photographer ID into the filename, just the timestamp and the image ID.
Exported files being sent to a customer do include a photographer ID and the image ID (extracted from the metadata), and the image ID can be used to correlate those back with the master files.

I'd appreciate feedback from anyone here on this.  The concept of having "globally" unique IDs inserted into the metadata doesn't seem to be supported in any of the downloaders/importers I've seen, but having used it for so long I can't really imagine working without it.  Is there a practical reason the other software out there doesn't support it (ImageIngester comes closest with its dynamic metadata templates) or is it just that no-one else has thought about it?

Thanks!

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David Burren

[David Burren]

Incidentally, my system started out on Unix systems, moved to OS X using iView, and now is managed with a mixture of iView and Lightroom.  Originally the IDs were rendered as hexadecimal numbers (e.g. N1_211A was allocated on the machine "N1" and is image 211A [8474 in decimal]) to render shorter strings.  On the systems I used to use, filenames were sorted as a single string, and thus N1_211A, N1_2119, N1_2000, and N1_2120 would be sorted as:

• N1_2000
• N1_2119
• N1_211A
• N1_2120

which is the order they were allocated in.  However, at least on OS X these days the sort order has been changed to be more "user-friendly" and they instead get sorted as:

• N1_211A (the software is identifying the "211" as a number, trailed by an "A")
• N1_2000
• N1_2119
• N1_2120

So I've had to change back to decimal image IDs so that images will be sorted correctly within each minute...
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David Burren

[David Burren]

I've started a new thread concentrating on the use of the Title field, and responses to this thread might be better-directed there.