Good names in photography workflow

Name at last- Good names in photography workflow

Wait a minute. We have still not given the file a name. That Is right and that is because at this point things get more complicated. From now on its a matter of taste and how ones mind likes to work.

As I thought in the oldies when I started sorting out my images, that my brain would not take complicated system, I took the first image and gave it a simple name. 00000001 and so on. Soon I did discover that it could not be this simple. I wanted to be quick finding images and I also had my BW images in separate files and the negatives on another. So I started marking my negs neg00001 and the black and white images bw000001. This was fine. As soon as I started shooting digital, I took up dig00001 for the first one and so on.

image usa02429 Beach of Bandon, Oregon USA 2006

Now that I am traveling I saw that this was not the best of things so I altered it a little. As I need to have my images on external hard drives (I only have laptop with me) I could not have endless hard drives.. Thus it becomes necessary to swap the disk in its enclosure once in a while. Thus I have each country (or there about) on separate hard-drives. To simplify things I therefore give the files names after the countries they are taken in. USA00001 and CAN00001 for USA and Canada.
As you can see I am still using the 8.3 method and it is working fine. I have endless possibilities in name giving and can still be very quick finding images.

So there is in fact little I can do to help from here on. I have given you the methods of how to do it and the only thing more I can do is show you how I am doing it to day. From there on you are on your own.

read more in raw pipeline by Ted dillard

The structure
My structure on my travels is like this:

1. The first disk is named travel01
I use 8 digits but as I reckon I will not go over 99 disks on my travels(99 disks in 3 years should be enough) there fore I use letters and two digits. I do not name the disks by the countries as I might stop different times in each country and therefor to save space might want to have more than one country on each disk.

2. On each disk are two folders one named (country+)RAW and the other (country+)final F.X usaRaw and USAfinal
It should be obvious that the raw files go in the raw folder and the tif files (developed files) go in the final folder. Actually I do put the RAW in DNG format (more on that later) and then take the original RAW (xxxxxxxx.cr2) and burn them on DVD

In the Raw folder I have a folder with the month and with in that the folders with the day and then the DNG file

FX usaraw-->0706->16070701-->usa00866.dng

With in the final folder I use a little bit different system. I do not know why but it probably is left overs from old times.

First there is a folder 00011000. Inn here all images from 1 up to 1000 go.
In there I have an other folder like 00010100 and 01010200 that is images 1 to 100 and then 101 to 200 and so on. Still holding on to the 8 digit system.

The main reason I did this in the beginning was for the computer to have easier access to the files and be quicker reading and writing files. Specially when batching. The more files there are in one folder the slower things go as the system has to check the name each time it saves a file. If this is needed and actual to day I do not know but I have been doing it for so long that I just can not let go. You could as well keep the day system, and have the same structure in the Raw folder as the Final folder.

So now you can start importing those files and get to work. Next we will be looking at Metadata. Exif, IPTC and such things.