Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Doof]

I've been working on tagging my photos using the People/Places/Events tags, and Genre, Year, Artist (Photographer) and Album.

I'm trying to figure out a nice, cohesive way of naming these files when I'm done. I use Artist - Name for audio, but the same doesn't seem to work as well for Images.

I've contemplated just assigning all pictures a unique number, and letting MC handle the orginization and searching using the tags.

How are you handling this?

[sraymond]

Doof,

My biggest problem was getting rid of the cryptic name assigned by the camera.  Assigning a unique number is harder than it might seem - especially as you acquire new images.  You'd have to manually check for the next available number and then figure out how to fill from there.

The [Date (Filename Friendly)] was the answer to my problem.  As you can't take more than one photo a second (well, at least my camera can't), you're guaranteed that this results in a unique filename.  I also find it intuitive to use the date when looking for a photo outside of MC (which happens much less frequently these days!)  My only complaint is that I can't customize the format of the [Date (Filename Friendly)] field...  but I continue to hope that this will someday get implemented.  Until then, the current situation works.

Scott-

[Doof]

That does sound like a good idea. The Date (Filename Friendly) would turn out to be a unique number for each photo I take. It's kind of like its own serial number.

My only problem is that most of the pictures I have are not ones that I've taken. A lot of them were taken by other people I know, and most are pictures I've downloaded over the years.

Maybe I can just pick some date that I know is earlier than any of the others and use that to symbolize one of the downloaded pics.

[Phil Lee]

I use a utility called Exifer to rename my files based on the EXIF time/date stamp. The program uses the date as a prefix and adds a counter to the name. The filenames end up in the form:

<date>-<counter>.jpg

For example:

19092003-001.jpg

was the first photo taken on 19th September 2003.

I prefer using Exifer to the Date (Filename Friendly) option because I have a lot more control over the naming convention used.

I store my photos under My Pictures in folders named by Year, month and date. For example:

2003\September\2003_09_19

[sraymond]

I prefer using Exifer to the Date (Filename Friendly) option because I have a lot more control over the naming convention used.

I agree wholeheartedly...  but the tradeoff is having to use a separate application (other than MC) for acquiring the photos and then using Exifer (which I don't remember acquiring photos) to rename and then using MC's import function.

Acquire from MC (which is almost always running anyway) and a quick fill of the name and a fill filename from the name is less work for my use.

Though it would be nice if MC added some sort of regular expression type builder to create the filename using your own custom format.  Who knows...  maybe v10?

Scott-

[JimH]

Maybe you could use the "send to" to send files to exifer.

[sraymond]

Maybe you could use the "send to" to send files to exifer.

Well, sure...  but once the filename changes that causes a problem with the MC database, right?  An integrated MC solution is much better.

Scott-

[nila]

Just had a look at Exiffer Scott,

It's a powerful tool, thanks for mentioning it.

You seem to be one of the most clued up here in regards to images. It's good to have you around for image idea's, suggestions, comments!

[Phil Lee]

I agree wholeheartedly...  but the tradeoff is having to use a separate application (other than MC) for acquiring the photos and then using Exifer (which I don't remember acquiring photos) to rename and then using MC's import function.

Acquire from MC (which is almost always running anyway) and a quick fill of the name and a fill filename from the name is less work for my use.

Though it would be nice if MC added some sort of regular expression type builder to create the filename using your own custom format.  Who knows...  maybe v10?

Scott-

I must admit I do go through a 3 stage process. First I acquire images using Canon Zoombrowser EX. These get stored in the correct folders automatically. Next I rename the files using Exifer as I mentioned in my first post. Finally I import them into MC and tag them accordingly. It would be great to use MC to do all of this but last time I tried it couldn't acquire images from a Canon camera. I may try using my card reader instead to see if it can acquire images from that.

[JimH]

We added acquisition through WIA in 9.1.  I think this will work with the Canon.

[edit: Matt says it isn't working.  We'll take a look.]

We can look at improving renaming for the next version.

[Phil Lee]

We added acquisition through WMI in 9.1.  I think this will work with the Canon.

We can look at improving renaming for the next version.

I have just done some testing with MC 9.1.258. I can acquire images using my card reader with no problem. MC sees the card reader as a digital camera. I was able to cancel the download after downloading 3 images.

I then hooked my Canon PowerShot A70 to the PC. MC couldn't see it as a digital camera but it did list it as an available device. I selected the device and asked to download the images. MC started to acquire images but didn't give an option to cancel the image downloading. After downloading 42 out of the 101 images on the memory card MC displayed a message box which said "Server busy. This action cannot be completed because the other program is busy. Choose "Switch To" to activate the busy program and correct the problem". The box had two active buttons on it, Switch To and Retry and one greyed out button, Cancel. Clicking on Switch To just opened the Windows XP Start menu. Clicking on Retry displayed the same dialog again. The only way I could break out of the sequence was to switch off the camera.

For the time being I'll stick with the Canon image acquistion software because it allows me to preview images before downloading them and allows me to control the file naming during acquisition.

[skeeterfood]

I must admit I do go through a 3 stage process. First I acquire images using Canon Zoombrowser EX. These get stored in the correct folders automatically. Next I rename the files using Exifer as I mentioned in my first post. Finally I import them into MC and tag them accordingly. It would be great to use MC to do all of this but last time I tried it couldn't acquire images from a Canon camera. I may try using my card reader instead to see if it can acquire images from that.

Check out cam2pc at http://www.nabocorp.com/cam2pc/index.php.  It can acquire, rename based on EXIF/filename/etc with custom templates, and sort into directories all in one step.  If your camera has an orientation sensor, it can also automatically losslessly rotate the image.  You can even set it up to start acquiring automatically when you plug your camera in for total laziness


-John

[sraymond]

Just had a look at Exiffer Scott,

It's a powerful tool, thanks for mentioning it.

Er...  Thanks Phil.

Scott-

[sraymond]

I have just done some testing with MC 9.1.258. I can acquire images using my card reader with no problem. MC sees the card reader as a digital camera. I was able to cancel the download after downloading 3 images.

Phil,

You might want to try using your camera's WIA driver.  MC doesn't play nice with my Kodak's native driver, but using XP's WIA driver works just fine.  The only downside to using the WIA drivers is that JRiver hasn't gotten around to creating a WIA event so that you can automatically launch MC when the camera is plugged in.

Scott-

[sraymond]

For the time being I'll stick with the Canon image acquistion software because it allows me to preview images before downloading them and allows me to control the file naming during acquisition.

That're three more suggestions for the next version - and all would be nice improvements.

Add to that list:  WIA events, an overall progress bar for importing, and a printing function.

Maybe we should develop of list of desired improvements (kind of like we did for video and Hairstyle way back when) for photo management?

Scott-

[Phil Lee]

Check out cam2pc at http://www.nabocorp.com/cam2pc/index.php.  It can acquire, rename based on EXIF/filename/etc with custom templates, and sort into directories all in one step.  If your camera has an orientation sensor, it can also automatically losslessly rotate the image.  You can even set it up to start acquiring automatically when you plug your camera in for total laziness


-John

Thanks for pointing me in the direction of that utility. I downloaded the beta 3.1.3 version (which supports my Canon camera). It does exactly what I want in a single program leaving me to import the images into MC 9.1. This reduces the number of programs I use to 2 which is great.