photos without file numbers & dates

[Sossity Corby]

any suggestions on how to rename digital photos that don't have a date or file name? I have a whole bunch from when I started shooting digital, around 2003 & 04. Some were taken by people who did not set the camera date. On some of them I have an idea of the month & year but no date, others only the year, & still others I have no idea, most of them also do not have the unique camera file number either. I also have alot of scans of old photos where the date is unknown. & how would it fit into the "bucket"  scheme? would like to be pointed in right direction before I begin renaming & using a lot of time.

Sossity

[Ken]

What is your current naming scheme?  I suggest that you devise a variation on that scheme.  For example, pick a year that pre- (or post-) dates any of the years that you will normally be working with.  If your files begin with a four-digit year, then choose something like 1900.  You could use X's for month and/or date place holders.  Whatever you choose, it should make sense to you (at present and if you have not seen your photos for several months).  Chances are, if it does not immediately make sense to you at first glance, its probably too complicated for use in the long run.

--Ken

[markpirozzi]

If I scan a slide that I know the month and year it was taken (or have a good guess) I will give it a prefix of say 821200.  That's Dec. 1982.  The zeroes are a tip off that the exact date is not known.

In your case, I would make my best guess as to year and month, or just year, and arrange in some arbitrary order within the year and rename.  Ten years and more out you will be glad that you have them pinned down to within a year.

Mark

[Bob Nason]

and if you're not sure of the month, you could use 21 - 24 to indicate either which quarter of the year it relates to or the season it was taken.

BobN

[Bob Nason]

On second thoughts, just how important is the actual date anyway?

I'm just fine tuning the system I'm going to implement and I'm not convinced that my naming convention shouldn't just include YYYYMM for the date aspect.  I'm not sure what advantage including DD will give me.

I can't think that I would ever shoot more than 1000 pictures on any given day, so my naming convetions could be either of:

YYYYMMDD_NNN or

YYYYMM_NNNN

Am I missing something?

Ta

BobN

[Mike Guilbault]

I feel the same way Bob.  Personally, I use YYMMcNNNN, so a filename will look like 0805a1234.  YYMM is obvious.  the single 'c' alpha character used to be an underscore but I recently changed that to an alpha character camera ID since I now shoot with two different cameras that the NNNN part, the unique filename number that the camera creates, may overlap (one camera just rolled over 9,999 so is back in the 0100's at this point and I just purchased a second body (same camera make/model) that I'm approaching the 0100's as well).  I can always sort by capture time if I want a chronological order to my images.

Since all my digital photography started after 2001, I can safely use the YY model rather than YYYY.  If I scan any previous images to this, or have an image of unknown origin, I assign it a 00 for the year.  Using 4 digits for the NNNN part allows me 9,999 shots before rolling over and like you, I seriously doubt I'd be shooting over 10K images on any one camera in a given month.  I would definitely use 4 rather than 3 digits here, and it's one more space rather than the two you would need for the DD part of the name.

Personally... I like shorter filenames.  When they get longer than 8 or 9 digits/characters, the software doesn't display the entire name - more like 2004051...36.jpg, or something like that.  You then have to enlarge your thumbnails in order to read the filename.... just a pain. 

[David Burren]

Personally, I use YYMMcNNNN, so a filename will look like 0805a1234.  YYMM is obvious.  the single 'c' alpha character used to be an underscore but I recently changed that to an alpha character camera ID since I now shoot with two different cameras that the NNNN part, the unique filename number that the camera creates, may overlap (one camera just rolled over 9,999 so is back in the 0100's at this point and I just purchased a second body (same camera make/model) that I'm approaching the 0100's as well).  I can always sort by capture time if I want a chronological order to my images.

Since all my digital photography started after 2001, I can safely use the YY model rather than YYYY.  If I scan any previous images to this, or have an image of unknown origin, I assign it a 00 for the year.  Using 4 digits for the NNNN part allows me 9,999 shots before rolling over and like you, I seriously doubt I'd be shooting over 10K images on any one camera in a given month.

When shooting airshows I can do several thousand images PER DAY, although obviously the airshow only lasts for a few days.  And when working on wildlife safaris I can easily average >500/day.  So 9999 shots per month could be asking for occasional trouble.

Also note that (at least with the Canon cameras, I presume Nikon does similar things) if you end up moving cards between camera bodies then each camera will increment the counter to the greater of: it's internal counter and the last file on the card.  So with camera A on 0123 and camera B on 9989, if you end up swapping cards (e.g. you take them out to ingest, but hurriedly reload them when an elephant charges your campsite) then both cameras will be shooting from 9990, and it won't take camera A long to wrap around and re-use the numbers from earlier in the day.  I find that having a rule where you only use particular cards in particular cameras isn't flexible enough for real-world use: it will fall over at some point.


Currently I'm still using YYYYMMDDhhmm_ID (where ID is a globally-unique counter).  Because ID is globally unique I could omit the date/time from the filename, or I could shorten it to YYYYMMDD or even YYMM.  But for a long time I've been used to having files in Finder/Explorer sorted in chronological order so I'm still using the full date/time info.  I may change at some point, but old habits die hard...