A Good File Naming System for Photos is Essential
As a photographer you have to worry about many things, including what happens after a shoot. But here’s a scenario that could happen to any one of us:
You were a rock star on the shoot and the client is very happy. You or your retoucher did an amazing job finishing the image and, not only is the client happy, but their client is even happier. If you’re a wedding shooter, the whole family loves you!
Now they call to do additional licensing or make a huge print. They love you so much they want to make sure you are compensated well for the added use or for the print. You are thrilled, but when you look for the image, but you can’t find it. You forgot what you called it or didn’t store it properly. It’s buried in a pile of unorganized hard drives with a generic file name that the camera gave it.
In a matter of seconds you go from being so thrilled about making some easy money to spending two whole days looking for the file. In the worst case, you lost the file because it was not Archived correctly. You vow to never let this happen again!
Preventing this from happening is very, very easy. It just takes a little discipline and effort when processing the images so you never have to worry about it again. Doing it at the beginning of the shoot, or as soon as the images come off your card, means that every file that is passed around for people to check out, edit from or ogle over will have the same name. If you let files out before this process, you are sending out orphan images that you have to then manually match up to the parent file.
The file name serves one purpose: to identify the file and keep all files organized. A good file naming system for photos is essential.
Here’s my easy 4-step file naming system:
1. Put the date at the beginning of the name to keep the files in a hierarchical order. In other words, they will fall in order because the number at the beginning is incremental. To do this I reverse the date, using the year, then month, then day. For example, “20140101” would be for January 1st, 2014. This is then separated from the next chunk of file naming information with an underscore – the universal file name separator (Do not use odd characters like “/” or “@” or “:” because these are file path directions in some computer systems. Keep the separators to underscores).
2. Put the subject name. Since I am a portrait photographer I use a last name first name scenario. An example of this would be “Scorsese_Martin”. But if you shoot weddings you might want to use the last name of the bride and groom. If you shoot cars, use the the car model and year. Use whatever name here works for you, but know that the name is the backup if you do not have paperwork telling you what date it was shot on.
3. Use an acronym for your company. Mine is MGP; standing for Michael Grecco Photography – an abbreviation for my company. If the files were only used internally I would never need this, but since I often send my clients files from which to edit, I want to be able to identify my work from everyone else’s images.
4. I need a file number in the name. Since we do not shoot one frame, the frames of the day need individual identifiers to differentiate them also. I use a 4 digit sequence because I have never shot more than 3000 images in a day so going past 9999 is very unlikely in one day.
Since I try to capture tethered as much as possible, I set up Lightroom to name the files as they come in and set the file number to 0001. If you shoot to a Sandisk card, do the same thing when you bring the images into the computer for the first time, or you can use the camera number for the frame number.
I have a great little piece of software called A Better Finder Rename and it enables me to play with thousands of file names on mass to do things like keep the original camera number on the file if I want. Please be aware though, if you are doing a two camera shoot, the file numbers might step on each other (two files with the same number) so sequencing the numbers from 0001 and sequencing them by creation date is a good solution.
If you use my plan here are some sample file names:
- 20140101_Scorsese_Martin_MGP_0456.dng
- 20130814_Smith_Jones_Wedding_MGP_3211.dng
- 20101210_Radiohead_MGP_0725.dng
I then keep the files in a folder named as such:
20140101_Scorsese_Martin_MGP on one of my archive drives with a second copy as a backup. In this folder are three more folders:
- 20140101_Scorsese_Martin_MGP_Jpg
- 20140101_Scorsese_Martin_MGP_DNG
- 20140101_Scorsese_Martin_MGP_Selects
The folder 20140101_Scorsese_Martin_MGP_Jpg contains the 1200 width images we sent the client to edit from. We also used these images to make 450 width images for the copyright office for copyright registration.
The 20140101_Scorsese_Martin_MGP_DNG has the raw files in it all converted to DNG. I do not like to archive in camera raw formats fearing that I might not be able to open them someday (The Adobe DNG format is the format that Adobe is designating as its long term Archival/Universal raw format).
Lastly, once we retouch the images we put them on our server/Raid on the office network. I also keep a copy of the retouched images in the shoot folder on the archive drives. Since I have a set of archive drives in the office and one out of the office, it gives me offsite safety of my images.
Avoid disasters wherever you can. A little thought goes a long way to saving valuable work, time and clients!
I hope this blog piece for was helpful. Please feel free to comment below with your thoughts. Also check out ProStorage.com for products to make your life that much easier!