FILING

TOPS PRODUCTIVITY SPECIALISTS

FILING YOUR DIGITAL IMAGES - INCLUDING SCANNED IMAGES

With the advent of digital photography, we are all taking many more pictures than we ever used to and many people are now backtracking and scanning old slides, negatives and photographs. The following is just one suggestion for making sure that your digital images pictures are not consigned to the equivalent of a junk room, chock full of hidden treasures, but easily lost to future generations.

Saving to DVDs, flash cards or even stored on a hard drive is fine, but far too many people seem to struggle to organise their images logically and what usually happens is that 1,000s are not only scattered throughout the owner’s or even the family’s systems, but either finding them or dating them then becomes harder and harder.

We all know that a digital camera records the time the image was initially taken, but often, cropping and enhancing and saving loses the original data, so don’t rely on it. Scanning certainly doesn't contain useful information.

What follows has worked well for me and some members of our family, so if you are struggling to cope with storing 100’s of images, particularly when travelling, this may be of some help.

Just so that you know where I am coming from, I am the eldest son of a professional (press and industrial) photographer who not only took 1000’s of photographs on glass, positive and negative film, (much of which I still have), but I too have taken anything up to 1500 (digital) photographs in a weekend and from about 1964, have also taken 1000’s of pics, often up to 200 a day on slide or negative film. Needless to say, I still have those negatives and slides but one or two prints disappeared following a marriage break up!

It may be a pain – especially when cruising internationally with constant time adjustments or flying from one time zone to another, but it is a great help if you keep your camera’s clock updated. The reason for this becomes more apparent when travelling with a group and there are several people all taking photographs and someone elects to produce a DVD/video of the trip but needs to ensure pics are in a logical sequence . (More of that later.)

OVERVIEW

By using the date and sequence as the main image title, future filing and genealogical research is simplified. This is just as valid, maybe more so, with older scanned images. Quite simply, as you backtrack with scanned images, they will automatically be filed in date order and you will not be constantly reshuffling and sorting.

SOFTWARE

Most digital cameras come with excellent software that allows a certain amount of either setting up to suit the naming system or allows batch renaming of several pictures at once, afterwards. I use Canon’s “Zoom Browser” which is excellent and even though the Nikon programme is also excellent, I find that Zoom Browser does the job well.

FILING and SAFETY = BACK UPS

You have heard it 100s of times, but your original images should always be backed up. Having lost 40 hours worth of updating and renaming when an external hard drive crashed, two weeks after I’d bought it, I do not trust any single piece of computer equipment... Technology is changing rapidly, but is not necessarily any more reliable. Even brand new hard drives have been known to fail.

MIRROR or RAID

Without heading down a technical route, I was advised to get my latest PC set up with two identical 1 Terrabyte hard drives and the set up is that I write to one hard drive and whatever I put on that drive is automatically copied to the other. In the event of a hard drive failure, you simply replace it and the data all gets copied onto the new one! Since having that PC built, I have had three hard drive failures – but lost nothing. (Later put down to a software hiccup...)

FILE NAMING - CAN APPLY TO WORD OR TEXT FILES AS WELL AS PICTURES

FILE NAMING CONVENTION – THE YEAR

First of all, to sort images out in true date order, then the first digits must represent the year, however, being lazy by nature and always looking for short cut I challenged the 4 digit year. I try to name or rename all files with the year first.

So, 1946 1966, 1996, 2006, 2016 is one digit too many.

146, 166, 196, 206, 216 loses nothing out in accuracy. It will outlive us anyway...

However, an underscore breaks up a longer string of numbers and makes it much easier to read

146_ 166_ 196_ 206_ 216_

FILE NAMING CONVENTION – THE MONTH & DAY

For the sake of uniformity, both month and day have to be two digits each. The Americans got that right as they always have put the month before the day!

146_0406 146_0731 146_1005 etc.

OPTIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER

Where you have a group, or several family members taking photographs at the same time, then obviously if all use the same naming convention, there is a danger of overwriting so there needs to be an indicator of some sort somewhere to prevent this.

For our family history, or 95% of my own stuff, I do not use an indicator and that becomes the default. However if Dave or Julie add to the pile, I add their initial, followed by an underscore

146_0406_ (me) 206_0706_ (me) 216_0706D_ (Dave) 210_0706J_ (Julie)

FILE NAMING - SEQUENCE

The rest of the file name is the sequence and if you are so inclined, further info.

If you are unlikely to take more than 100 pics a day, then 01, 02, 03 etc is adequate. Once again, because of the of the way computer’s sort out file names, that zero or two digits is critical. If you have taken or are are likely to be taking over 100 pics in a given day, then it must be 001, 002, 003, 0088 etc, NOT 1, 2, 3, 88. If you do that, the computer will put number 20 straight after number 2 instead of after number 19

RECAP

The main file names will now look like this - 146_0214_01 146_0214_02 211_0525_199 etc.

PROBLEMS

When scanning old photographic material, often the date may not be known, particularly with old family snapshots, so 100% accuracy isn’t often possible, so you may need to take a best guess approach and make it obvious that it is a guess. This is done by assuming the year (not all that easy but there may be clues, especially if you can compare with other pics). Seasons may give a clue to the month so take a guess or use 00.

The same then applies to the day – 00 and the sequence may not be too relevant, though most old commercial negative films and slides do have a number on them. Industrial film stock is not numbered.

ADDITIONAL

1) For travellers you can leave a space after the above naming and you can put the location ie. 208_0812_01 Hawaii

208_0819_34 Moorea. For others, try and use just one word to give you a clue as to event or location but the date is always your biggest clue and also the most useful.

2) Keeping the original is important but if like me you do a lot of cropping, then make a copy of the original and this becomes 208_0819_34b (or c or d etc) as often you may want to experiment with colour balance etc as well as cropping or you may want to email a 350kb image rather than a 4mb image – very useful when blogging or using paid internet uploads and emails....

3) Whilst Mac computers have some sophisticated systems and there are lots of software indexing packages around, if you use Windows Explorer at all, right click on any file name>properties and you have opportunities to add further details including grading up to 5 stars.

Remember that as you get more proficient and get used to taking photographs, you'll soon get 100s or even 1000's and if they are all parked together, there may be difficulties, particularly in an older computer with not a lot of memory, so you might want to subdivide. As I tend to use the computer for business, leisure and family, it makes it more useful to subdivide often. Overall, I adopted to use colour to sub divide at the top level.

FURTHER FILING – DIRECTORIES or FOLDERS - OPTIONAL

My own system has to cover several major areas –

Family/Personal/Travel	(Coded 01 GREEN)
Business	(Coded 02 RED)
Cars and motorsport	(Coded 03 BLUE)
Music	(Coded 04 YELLOW)
MP3 Music	(Coded 07 ORANGE)

Plus several others of course, but you can see how this does tidy things up a bit - it also allows box files for paperwork to marry up to the computer and even colour coded DVD/CD plastic cases.

Most PCs have an annoying habit of putting all your pictures into “My Pictures” all documents into "My documents" and it can get rather crowded! far better to create your own directories and it also means that back ups to CD, DVD or memory stick are also easier.

DOWNLOAD TO PC/LAPTOP OFTEN

I have a morbid fear of having my camera(s) stolen or losing them – particularly when travelling. Insurance may pay for your equipment but it certainly won’t replace your pics, so I download and rename to the lap top daily, then transfer as soon as possible to the main PC. When travelling, it may even pay to either drop down onto DVD or even small USB drives as a 4Gb USB drive is now quite cheap and is almost a DVD full. I have even seen 4Gb cards for about $20 duty free.

GROUP TRAVELLING

I mentioned earlier that setting the accurate time on your digital camera was important but never more so than when someone is charged with making up a record of a trip or event. Although the photographer’s name will sort in overall date order, it will still put Andrew before Zebedee, so the next default is to sort all images by the time taken.

The compiler can sort out copies of the images by time taken and then rename them all in one hit. Easy.

It only needs one member of the group to have an incorrect camera clock setting and the compiler’s work load is dramatically increased... Been there, done that, got the tee shirt.

I hope that helps or at least helps you with what can become a nightmare if not controlled.

If you have any comments or suggestions, or questions, please email (details on the contacts page).