If You Don’t Add This to the Filename of Your Scanned Photos, You’ll Probably Hate Yourself Later

Congratulations, Donna, on getting started on your big project! You know, you’re right. There is a lot of information out there about filenaming, and a lot of it still tells you not to use spaces. But, honestly, my opinion is that most of this information is based on fear and a lack of understanding about how far along computer operating systems have come. Modern Mac and Windows operating systems (within the last 15-20 years, etc.) allow for spaces, upper case letters, and many of the character symbols you find on your keyboard.
You, as the caretaker of your photos, have all of this organizing work ahead of you. I believe you should label your files in a method that makes it easy for you, and still has the information that will be important for generations to come. I personally like spaces and dashes and upper case and a few symbols here and there! It makes it easier for ME to work. It’s easier on my eyes, and it makes organization easier as a whole.
Now, if we choose a system like this, sure, our filenames might get automatically renamed every once in a while. For example, if you take a photo with spaces and upload it to a website, often the website software will automatically replace the spaces with “_” (underscores). But, so be it. On your computer, they will still have spaces and will be easier for you to work with. Or, if you have a relative running on an old computer from the early 1990s, etc., and you give him or her all of your photos with spaces, then maybe there will be some issues. But, this is so unusual. Old computers with ancient operating systems are so rare now.
But, just for your peace of mind, know this. There are lots of utility programs out there you can download cheaply (if not free) that batch-rename files for you in seconds. Let’s say you use spaces and uppercase, and later — maybe a few years from now — you decide you are done with your project and you don’t want the spaces. You can run folders full of photos through these renaming apps, and you tell it to find spaces and replace them with “_” underscore characters (as an example). You push the “Start” button, and within seconds, all of your photo files will be renamed without spaces. But not just spaces, you can add and remove all kinds of characters and words, etc., if you would like.
So, my point here is… don’t be afraid to make it easier on yourself — especially while you are doing all of this work. Don’t force yourself to conform to outdated technical requirements of computer operating systems from 30+ years ago. You need to enjoy working on this project — don’t let it work on you! 😉

Hi Victory,

Scanning at a high resolution, and including any border around a print, can indeed make it easier to identify people, places, and events shown in originals. A useful rule-of-thumb for determining your scanning resolution is to decide what the maximum size you may someday want to print a particular image. For example, if you decide you might want a 16 x 20″ print from a particular original, figure on printing at 200 to 300 dpi. A 300 dpi print, 20 inches on the longer side, should be scanned at 20″ divided by the actual number of inches on the corresponding longer side of the original x 300 (dpi). For a 4″ x 5″ original, that would give 20/5=4 x300 = 1200 spi. If you do all your scanning at whatever scanning resolution you determine with this formula, you can always get smaller prints made with no loss of resolution and sharpness, but if you use too low a scan resolution, you may not be able to make the desired size of enlarged print.

I suggest scanning every photo in its entirety, with any border included in the scan. Then, when the main subject(s) is/are relatively small in the original, do at least one additional scan of the original but move the crop rectangle in to include just the main subject(s). Consider using a higher scan resolution for this cropped image. Sometimes an enlarged object in the background will help identify a place or date range. If you can read the labels on products in a store window, for example, you can do more research and find out when those labels were commonly available. If they were available only in a specific area, such as “Bob’s Maple Syrup, product of Bennington, Vermont”, you can concentrate on researching family members who may have lived in or at least visited that area. Maybe the enlarged background will show a recognizable landmark.

The style of white border, if any, can provide an approximate date range, as can the total dimensions of the print. In the 1940s & 1950s, as well as possibly into the early 1960s, rough, decorative, edges were common on drug-store style prints. Later prints had smooth edges, and from the 1970s, especially for color prints, borderless prints were common. Many prints, smaller than 3.5 x 5″, are likely contact prints, made by placing the negatives directly on the printing paper. Up until at least WW 2, enlargers were not commonly used, so prints were made the same size as the negatives. Any color prints, except for some, relatively few hand-colored ones, will likely be from after 1945 when color film and printing paper became available. Up until the late 1960s, color film and paper were too expensive to be commonly used by most people, so chances are any color prints are post-1960. Kodachrome slide film started in the mid-1930s as the first-ever color slide film, so color slides must have been made after then, regardless of brand or film type.

When it comes to naming the people in a photo, don’t just say something like “Mom and me at Banff National Park in 1968.” Future generations won’t know for sure who “Mom” and “me” are. Instead, use something like “Mom (then her full name) and me (your full name)…”, It will be totally clear who is shown and the relationship between them. Others have found, as you may have already, that family pictures with such ambiguous naming are not much more helpful than they would have been without any names. If you use a program like Adobe Bridge, especially with the IPTC Cultural Heritage Panel, and fill in as many fields as possible, with as much information as you have available, that metadata will be written directly to each file and not get trapped in a proprietary database of some program which might not be available in the future. People looking at your images in the future will appreciate your time and effort invested in adding as much info as you can.

When you know, or at least are fairly sure, who took a particular photo, add that info as well in the metadata. If you don’t know for sure that your dad, and not your mom, took a particular picture, you can indicate that you suspect that the photographer was your dad (include his full name), but that you think your mom (full name) may have been the photographer. That might well be the case where your dad is shown in the photo but your mom is not. Likewise, if a different family member is missing from a group shot, that individual may have been the photographer, thus explaining why he/she is not shown.

That sounds like a reasonable naming system, Kerry, but I recommend you replace the dot/period before your last digit with an _ (underscore). Windows interprets the dot/period as a separator between the filename and the file extension so everything after it will be interpreted as the file extension and Windows won’t know what program to use to open the file. If you do go with this naming format, be sure to include both a digital note AND a printed hard copy note with your physical contact sheets so you and other (future) users will always be able to know what the code letters and numbers mean. If each PrintFile page holds a complete roll of 35 mm film negatives, you’ll have at least some two-digit numbers after your separator since you’ll have negatives 10 – 20, 24, 36, or maybe even 39, depending on the length of the original film. ( I consistently managed to get between 37 and 39 slides/negatives on a 36-exposure roll of film.) Up until about the mid-1970s, 35 mm film was generally available, at least in North America, in either 20- or 36-exposure rolls. About that time, the 24-exposure rolls replaced the 20-exposure rolls. I’ve seen 12-exposure rolls listed in catalogs, but in about 50 years of photography, I don’t recall ever seeing one in a store. Another situation you may encounter with negatives going back about 80 years is one in which pros and some amateur photographers bought bulk, 100-foot long rolls of 35 mm film, then loaded their own cartridges with whatever length they needed for a particular shoot. While 40-frames (about 6 feet) was about the maximum that would safely fit into a standard 35 mm cartridge, they might have loaded any shorter length if they didn’t intend to shoot more than a few frames, especially with special-purpose films like Infra-Red black-and-white film or Kodak Positive Film, used to make positive black-and-white slides from regular negatives. Negatives from pre-1934-35 are most likely NOT 35 mm since 35 mm film first became available then. Other film (rather than glass plate) negatives you have may be any of a number of different sizes and formats but you no doubt have found the appropriate PrintFile sheets for those different sizes. Like 35-mm negatives, such negatives likely have individual frame numbers printed along the edge(s) but because different cameras could use 120 or 620 or 220 film but had different image sizes and formats, a roll of 120 film from one camera might have only eight 6 cm x 9 cm images on it, but the same length of film in a different camera might have more 6 x 6 cm square negatives on it. If your sheets hold more than one roll’s worth of negatives, you’ll likely have duplicated frame numbers on the actual negatives, so you’ll need to mark your negative number on each negative’s location in the PrintFile sheet to avoid possible confusion. It probably wouldn’t hurt to do a scan of the PrintFile sheet with your numbers on it and keep the digital copy with the digital images for that sheet so the digital files can be positively linked to the analog files.

Hi John, thank you for the compliments!

Yeah Art and I have joked with each other a couple times now that we both are too helpful for our own good — ha! I always worry that brevity won’t help someone who needs a lot of help making sense of some of these complicated procedures when it comes to computer applications and operating systems. Lengthy explanations makes me feel better that it has a better chance to make a difference in someone’s life. 🙂

Art has brought out a lot of post ideas that I’ve failed to bring to fruition. I’m sure it’s frustrated him as much as it’s frustrating you right now! This is a long way of saying I haven’t yet written that post about how to find a physical print from a unique number associated with it. So, let me give you some “brief insights” now as you’ve requested.

First, I have to quickly volunteer that this reverse procedure will never be as efficient as the other way around. It will always be easier to find a digital image by searching for the unique number in a computer database of a psychical image you’re holding. I think there are enough benefits just to be able to search in that direction to make it worth the time and effort of creating and adding the unique numbers.

But, even though it’s harder there are still ways to find your physical prints and slides from unique numbers. It’s easy to think of a situation where all physical originals are completely out of order, without any logic to where they are stored. And, while this is possible, I’d like to assume most people will inadvertently create some order with their scanning that they can take advantage of.

METHOD EXAMPLE #1
The best case scenario would be for people that chronologically order all of their digital images, and then do the same with their physical originals. Someone who might eventually create physical albums for all of their prints would be able to find the corresponding prints based on their shoot date. For example, it would be fairly easy to find a given print taken in October of 1975 by finding the section of your photo album collection where all of your photos from October of 1972 are being stored. In fact, if your prints are also organized into the same “events” of that month and year as your digital collections are, that will make it even easier.

METHOD EXAMPLE #2
Another method might be to assign additional metadata somewhere to each image with where you plan to store this original. This could be in other IPTC metadata fields, or it could be just adding a little bit more information to the unique number. For example, let’s say you decide to store all of your slides in my favorite Logan Slide File metal containers. Each container has a corresponding paper chart that you can store with it that breaks up the container into lots of separate but identically sized sections (It’s easy to tape this paper to the inside of the top lid). You can number each of these sections and then give each Slide File container a separate number or letter.

So, imagine giving each slide a unique number like this: “13289-F12.” This could indicate to you that this particular digital image has a corresponding master slide stored in Slide File box marked “F” and is sitting in the separate partitioned area number 12. Now it’s just a matter of finding that particular slide marked “13289” that is sitting with about 30 or so other slides in that small partition. Or “04893-B56” could tell you that your print is being stored in photo album marked “B” and is sitting on page 56.

METHOD EXAMPLE #3
Or here’s a less “geeky” way of doing it. Let’s say you have all of your originals are stored in unusual and unique storage containers. For instance, it’s not unusual that someone’s collection might be made up of prints in a combination of 3 cardboard boxes and 2 shopping bags filled with photo albums. Someone’s slides might be in those plastic slide carousels used in slide projectors or in all of those little cardboard boxes that you got them in from the developers.

Now, let’s say you are concerned about being able to do this reverse search later, without making it too complicated. So, what you decide to do is scan a container full of images all together, before moving on to scan the next physical container. So if you start scanning that first album full of prints on June 3rd of 2014, and you don’t finish until June 27th, you now have scanning dates saved in the metadata of your scanned images for the time and date they were created. Take a piece of “paper tape” that you can write on with a Sharpie marker and write “Scanned 2014-06-03 — 06-27” on it and fix it to the outside of the album. (For an album, the bottom front of the spine would be best so you can read it if sitting upright on a shelf)

Someday, if you find an image in your digital photo collection that you want to find the original print to, all you have to do is look in the metadata properties of the image and find the “date created” information. This will represent the time and date your image was scanned and saved for the first time. When image number “03892” comes up as date created “2014-06-25,” you will now know you need to find the photo album that includes this date in the range marked on the outside. Once you pull the album, since you scanned in order from front to back of the album, you will also know that since it was June 25th, you also know it’s probably near the end of the album in one of the last few pages because you finished scanning the album on the 27th.

This method is also super useful for someone who opts out of going to the trouble of using unique numbers on each image. This will give them a fighting chance of finding their images in either direction by using the “date created” to find their corresponding originals to their digital equals.

So John, these three examples certainly isn’t comprehensive, but it gives you an idea of some of the ways and tricks you can come up with to meet your own needs. Some methods require more work than others, and some are more useful than others. I can only imagine how many dozens and dozens of ways like this someone could come up with to make this task possible.

Have you come up with any ideas of your own that might be effective as well?

Art, very interesting. Hmm. I need check this out and revisit what I what I wrote in my 3-part series. It’s my darn optimism that everything with technology will incrementally improve.

I certainly don’t expect even the most meticulous person to create filenames that are hundreds of characters long. But, I must admit, I assumed Microsoft would be improving their OS over the last few years to accommodate longer filenames and be more forgiving with at least a few more unusual characters. I guess it’s their determination to hang onto legacy compatibility.

I wish I had someone working in my “lab” that could be a tester for me for example like filename variations across different platforms. An assistant would certainly come in handy for this website!

Someday OS writers will get smart and realize that filenames and folders are metadata. The file system of the future will use filenames that aren’t useful at all to humans, such as a hash of the file’s contents; what we think of as the file name and path (folders) will simply be metadata – tags associated with the file. I wish that day would hurry up and get here!

Hi,

Thanks for the mention of me. I just read your reference about Aperture to see what Macworld said about its future. Not being a Mac user, I have no experience with either iPhoto or Aperture but from what I’ve read on Curtis’ blog and elsewhere, I’d suggest going with Lightroom or possibly Corel’s AfterShot Pro 2, since it’s now available for Macs as well as Windows and Linux. I’ve just downloaded AfterShot Pro (AS P) and haven’t yet had a chance to get into using it but I have used Lightroom for a year or so. One concern I have about Lightroom (LR) is that now that it’s offered as part of Adobe’s subscription service, it may not be available as a stand-alone program for much longer. While any subscription software does have advantages, such as automatic updates whenever they’re released, I’m not keen on having a program on my computer that no longer functions, just because I might happen to be late making a subscription payment.

Since you can download free, time-limited trial versions of both LR and AS P, I’d suggest giving each a try to see if you prefer one over the other, then buy the one you prefer.

For collecting all your digital images in one location, I suggest you dedicate a partition or, better, a separate hard disk, possibly an external USB one, to your images files. You might label the partition/disk as “MY IMAGES”. Within the root directory of MY IMAGES, create separate folders by date in YYYY-MM-DD format (e.g. 2014-08-15 for 2014, August, 15. If you happen to shoot in various locations or various subjects on the same day, I’d add a brief note to that effect such as: 2014-08-15-flowers-address; 2014-08-15-CN-Capreol; 2014-08-15-CP-Sudbury. Once you’ve set up your folders like this, when you download files from your camera/phone/scanner, etc., you would place them in their respective folders. In this example, all the flower shots from my wife’s garden would go into the first folder, where I’d replace “address” with our street name and number; shots of Canadian National trains taken in the town of Capreol in the second folder, and shots of Canadian Pacific Railway trains taken in Sudbury in the third folder. When I visited the B&O RR Museum in Baltimore several years ago, on the same day I took digital shots at Thomas Viaduct, a stone viaduct near Baltimore built in the 1800s and still in daily use; shots of locomotives and train cars on display outside the museum buildings, and other exhibits displayed in the buildings. For that day, I created folders with the date in the given format, followed by a hyphen and a single digit number (first location getting a -1, second location (exterior shots) a -2, and the third location (interior shots) a -3. Each folder then had a hyphen followed by the name of the location, YYYY-MM-DD-1-Thomas-Viaduct; YYYY-MM-DD-1-B&O-Museum-Exterior, YYYY-MM-DD-3-B&O-Museum-Interior. This naming system lets my folders sort in Windows Explorer (like Mac’s Finder) in chronological order by date and location so if I want to find all my shots of flowers in the garden, I can search by date + “flowers” + address. I can use the same technique to search for all shots of either CN or CP trains in any location. Lightroom lets you use folder names as tags so with just a few mouse clicks, I can tag entire folders of images and search by tags.Of course, you should use folder names appropriate to your particular photo collection. By dedicating a partition or hard disk to your image files, you can easily locate all your images to copy to extra hard disks/DVD/BD or other backup/archive media. LR and AS P both let you add images and some other file types to their respective catalogs from anywhere on your system, without needing to physically copy those files to a dedicated LR or AS P catalog. The programs just add pointer information to whatever physical location your files occupy so if you want to include a specific image under multiple categories, such as a particular steam locomotive from the B&O Museum, you include a link to it from whatever category you want to include it in — B&O, steam, museum, 4-6-2 (a particular type of steam locomotive), Baltimore, etc. Any of those keywords/tags becomes searchable.

Unlike either iPhoto or Aperture, your files are not ‘trapped’ in a proprietary database so they can be easily accessed by any image editing software, although any edits made outside of LR or AS P, will not be included in their respective databases. Likewise, if you physically move files from one physical location to another outside of LR or AS P, you’ll need to open your program and let it find and re-link those files to update its references to them, but that’s easy to do.

When you’re ready to start scanning, I strongly recommend you buy a copy of VueScan Pro (about $80.00 US) from http://www.hamrick.com. The Pro version, but not the cheaper version, lets you capture .dng, .tif, and .jpg files in one scan pass. It also lets you create a base file name to which it adds an incremental number for scanning batches of slides/negatives/prints and automatically assign discrete file names. If you want to maximize your output capabilities (multiple resolutions for file archiving, emailing, image re-touching/editing, etc.) set your scan resolution to at least 2400/3200 ppi for slides/negatives, 600 ppi for 3.5×5″ prints or 400 ppi for 8×10″ prints, 48-bit color (even for black and white negs/prints), or, if your scanner includes I-R (Infra-red) dust and scratch removal (like the Epson V600), then use VueScan Pro’s 64-bit (48-bit color plus 16-bit I-R) to record the maximum amount of detail in tonal values for each color and from pure black to pure white. For archiving images, I normally scan 35-mm slides/negatives at 3200 ppi, 64-bit color, and save as .dng and .jpg. The .dng format records ALL the data the scanner is capable of capturing for the greatest range of editing later with minimal quality loss, although the file size is about 100 MB per image. The simultaneously saved .jpg compresses the data and discards some of that captured by the hardware but is a much smaller file size, although you’ll likely want to resize downward before trying to email any scanned images. There is a free trial version of VueScan (not the Pro version) available. It has all the features and capabilities of the regular version but places watermarks over each scanned image. Both versions of VueScan work well with literally hundreds of different scanners so you need download and pay for one copy for Windows, Mac, or Linux computers,. even if you have a flatbed scanner and a dedicated slide/negative scanner. If you later get a different make/model of scanner, your copy of VueScan/VueScan Pro should still work with the new hardware.

Photoshop Elements (PSE) is a great editing program but its cataloging capabilities are somewhat more limited than those of either LR or AS P. It’s also harder to transfer your keywords/tags, captions, descriptions, etc. out of its proprietary database so you’re more or less locked into using it for your cataloging if you start with it. Later versions may have an improved facial recognition algorithm but my experience with facial recognition in PSE 8 was crappy, to put it politely. It missed obvious people’s faces in some files while finding ‘faces’ in clouds, trees, and even a piece of machinery. I didn’t try to identify the same faces in different shots, so I can’t comment from experience on how well it might do with that but so far as finding faces to identify, it sucked. When I did correctly find a face, I could enter a name in a text box immediately below the face but the only way I could find to show that name in the future was to take a screen shot of it before moving on to another image. With group shots, the text boxes tended to overlap one another and they obliterated other faces in the photo so I could either see the unidentified faces or the names with bits and pieces of their respective faces peeking out here and there. Current versions of PSE and/or Picasa may perform better with facial recognition but I’m not in a position to comment on that.

Incidentally, I share your sentiments about Curtis’ choice to omit dates from his posts. I haven’t mentioned it to him, but I’d like to be able to search his posts by archive date, as well as by topic/title.

Art

Hi Greg,

Just recently I came across ACDSee Pro 8 Ultimate, a great program that runs on 64-bit versions of Windows. If you don’t have 64-bit Windows, you can still use the ACDSee Pro 8 regular version. There’s also a Mac version of ACDSee available. The Ultimate version adds to the features of the Pro 8 version the ability to work with layers, thus going a step beyond Lightroom. ACDSee Pro 8 has a 15-day free trial version of their cloud hosting service which can be subscribed to for additional money. There’s easy sharing included with all the Windows versions; a Map view which will let you locate images on Google Maps and/or Google Earth; Reverse Geocoding to enable including actual street addresses in image files, along with just latitude and longitude coordinates; extensive IPTC,EXIF, and ACDSee metadata fields which can be edited; all metadata can be written to the image files as well as being stored in the ACDSee data base; and decent image editing capabilities; and the ability to work with numerous camera RAW formats and DNG files. It’s possible to generate slide shows, PDF and PPT shows, and output file listings with numerous properties for each file included. You can download free trial versions of all the ACDSee programs from http://www.acdsee.com/en/free-trials?gclid=CNii3djglMYCFQWTaQodvqsAvA. When Curtis checked this out a month or so ago, he promptly bought the bundle that was on sale at the time. Give it a trial run and see if it’s what you’ve been looking for.

Ro, so many questions, so little time. 😉 Let me try and knock all of these out for you.

It’s very common to have photos with the dates wrong. Especially photos that were taken with cameras and not smart phones — smart enough to adjust the time as we travel in and out of time zones. Since you are using iPhoto, you should check out the post I made about adjust a photo’s “shoot date” specific to iPhoto. This will also help you with batching multiple photos if the offset is consistent amongst all of them:

https://www.scanyourentirelife.com/iphoto-change-date-time-photo-taken-digital-camera-scanned-photo/

When you import photos from your iPhone into iPhoto, or any camera, you can have iPhoto add all of the photos you select go into one event, or you can have it break your photos up into multiple events. I think when you do the import, you can check a box that asks you this. If not, I am sure in the preferences, in the general tab, you can set the “auto split into events” setting. Mine by default is set to “one event per day.” But there are other options that might be better for you.

The other thing you can do, which I do almost every time, is I don’t import ALL of my photos off my iPhone in the same batch. I select only groups of photos that I know make up a certain event, and I import those at one time. Then I go back into the import window, and I highlight another batch of photos to import into another event. This force-imports into events of your choosing, and saves you the time of having to manually break them up later.

But, even if you already do have a bunch of photos in one event, it doesn’t mean you can’t split them up later. You just highlight the photos you want to break off into another iPhoto event, and then you go up to Events at the top and choose “Create event” or “auto split event.”

Yes, the master images are stored in the Events page. If you delete a photo from there, you delete it from there as well as any place it’s in an album. So, it’s best to organize your events in some kind of highly logical format so that you and anyone else can find photos in there if need be. I like to organize all of my events chronologically. That way, years from now someone can find a photo without my help. Chronological makes sense to everyone and doesn’t require any kind of a “legend” to translate.

Then, from there, you can start making albums of your favorites. So you could make an album for “2013 Favorites” or an album of “Favorite Dog pics” and drag or add any photo you would like into these albums from all of your events. Your event folders may have too many photos in there — good shots, blurry shots, redundant shots etc — so you may not want to show people photos right out of your event folders. But, albums are a great way to isolate your favorite ones and create mini collections out of them of just your favorites.

Smart albums are also excellent because you can make an album that will automatically populate with photos and will dynamically change. Such as an album that is made up of any photo from a certain event, and has a rating of 3 stars or more. Then as you rate photos with star ratings (1-5) in that event, your smart event will start to populate that smart album with any photo you rate 3 or more stars. It’s beautiful and easy to do! You could have an album or smart album, 1 per event if you wanted! It’s up to you.

And lastly, as far as media and archiving, this is very subjective. Lots of opinions on this one. I personally am not a big fan of VHS and CD’s/DVD’s/mini dv anymore. I like to get these off this media and stored digitally, or stored in an alternate digital format. You can’t predict what format will be around indefinitely, but you can try and pick formats that are fairly safe now, and keep in mind through the years, they will need to be moved to more reliable backup drives/drive types etc as technology changes, and may need to be batch converted to a different file type all together.

Right now I feel safe with TIFF files, .MOV and MP4 files. So, this is how I am archiving my photos and video. But, if these formats ever start to seem like they aren’t going to be compatible across multiple platforms in the near future, I will be prepared to batch-convert them to the next “standard” that feels safe at the time.

Hi Ro,

One important point: DON’T let iPhoto or ANY program download and delete your photos from a phone or camera or any other device. ALWAYS download your photos to preferably at least two separate hard disks or partitions, other than the one your OS is physically located on. If anything goes wrong with the download process and the software you’re using is set to automatically delete after download, you will likely permanently lose at least some files. When you’re finished downloading all the files you want to include in a batch, visually check the downloaded copies to be sure the download worked properly BEFORE you manually delete the originals from the phone or camera. If you did encounter a problem and one or more files downloaded incorrectly for any reason, you can then go back and manually try to download them individually. Also, visually check any files you copy to CD/DVD/BD or hard disk for backup and archive copies to make sure they copied correctly and completely. I’ve read of people copying and pasting or dragging and dropping copies to DVD and only later learning that not all their files transferred correctly. This may have been because the total number of characters in the filename and path was too great or special characters were included in the file name. Mac OS, Windows, and Linux each has a list of illegal characters which cannot be used in file names and each OS has a finite number of permissable characters you can use. If you have too many characters, the excess ones get dropped off so you end up with apparently identical file names and may end up having only the last file copied since its name replaced all the previous, identical names. Currently, the UDF naming system is the most versatile for writing data to CD/DVD/BD, since it is cross-platform compatible and has the largest number of allowed characters. See if your burning software offers UDF as an option and use it if possible. The older ISO-9660 and Joliet standards allow far fewer characters in file names, even though they are still cross-platform compatible.

Not being an Apple user, I’ll defer to Curtis for comments re most of your questions. However, for Macs and other computers/laptops/tablets without CD/DVD drives built-in, these machines usually have at least one USB port. You can get portable, USB DVD burners that will read and write both CDs and DVDs (DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD-+RW, DVD-RW, DVD-DL+R, DVD-DL-R). which you can use with any computer with a USB port. Such burners can be found for anywhere from about $35.00 on up in Canada and probably comparable prices in Australia. If you want to maximize future compatibility, you might consider a portable, USB Blu-Ray (BD) burner instead. Several models are available (at least in North America) starting at about $125.00 (Canadian dollars). Check the specifications of any particular you might be considering since many lower-priced units actually burn only CD/DVD and read both those formats and BD but don’t write BD. Many of the specs list read/write capabilities for a variety of BD formats, such as dual-, triple-, and quad-layer media, both write-once and write-rewrite media but so far, I’ve not seen any triple- or quad-layer media actually being available to buy. Staples, a Canadian/US stationery supplier, currently offers 3-packs of single-layer, Verbatim brand, 25 gigabyte blank BD disks for about $30.00 Canadian. Since one 25-gig BD holds almost 5 times the quantity of data of a 4.7 (really about 4.4 gig) DVD, that’s not an unreasonable price when you consider how many fewer disks you’ll need to store any sizable photo collection.

When it comes to planning naming conventions and file formats for possible donation to the Australian National Archives, check with the Archives staff and learn what system(s) they use and if they’d accept your potential donation(s). If you were to use their recommended naming conventions and file formats for all of your data, at least you’d be using a standardize system that virtually anyone, now and in the future, would be able to easily use, even for your strictly personal/family data.

For your VHS and Mini-DV tapes, use an uncompressed .mov format (or uncompressed .avi format, if available on your Mac system) or H.262 or MP4 for compressed formats if you have no other option. MPEG-2 is the standard format for current DVD-Video files (like those found on commercial movie DVDs) but it does use compression so at least some of the originals’ data is discarded when it’s recorded to hard disk. I’ve recently been transferring some VHS tapes to hard disk using my HT VidBox, a Dell laptop running Windows 7 Home Premium, and a WD My Passport external USB hard drive. I’m using a factory refurbished Magnavox VHS/DVD combination player to play the VHS tapes. The tapes were recorded about 20 – 27 years ago and some of them were apparently recorded at EP speed to get 6 hours of recording onto a 2 hour tape. When I set my PowerDirector 12 Ultra recording software to record the NTSC standard signal (you’d use PAL in Australia) 640 x 480 pixel, 60 fields (30 frames) per second, many of these tapes suffered numerous video dropouts and showed only a blue screen instead of an image, while the audio was fine. My Magnavox player kept telling me the program was copy-protected and recording was prohibited before it stopped recording after about 2 seconds of this blue screen. By setting my PowerDirector to record to DVD-HQ (720 x 480 pixels, 60i (fields per second), I was able to record, in a single file, a 3.5 hour program onto my NTFS-formatted hard disk. I still got blue screens but many fewer dropped frames, even in that length of program, in a single 7+ gig file. My reason for trying and preferring the .avi format is that it was an uncompressed format so it wasn’t dependent on any specific codec (code-decode) software being installed on a computer for later playback. Over the 20 or more years of Desktop Video (recording video on home computers), many codecs have been developed by a variety of companies. Some of these companies, and their proprietary codecs, have disappeared and files relying on one of those codecs are now virtually impossible to play back. The MPEG-2 format of DVDs and the more recently developed H.262 and MP-4 codecs offer better quality compression algorithms so they give smaller file sizes with better quality and they are likely to be standard formats for quite some time to come. My understanding is that the QuickTime .mov codec changes from time to time as Apple upgrades it so I’m not sure how well .mov files recorded years ago with what is now an older version of QT can be played on current versions of QT. There’s also the potential problem of Windows users needing to download a separate QT player (albeit free) from Apple to be able to play QT .mov files. Not all users are willing to bother downloading and installing any player or other program so they wouldn’t necessarily be able to view your movies. Again, check with the Archives for their recommendation for file formats for video files.

Good luck and stick with your project.

Art

Hi Julie. Thanks for stopping in. 🙂

If you have to rename your scanned photos in full, in your suggested manner, “Wed, Dec 25th, 2013” then you are still way ahead of the curve of those that aren’t adding any kind of date information to the file name. I know it takes time to do all of this labeling, but it’s so worth the trouble when you feel the benefits later.

And it’s not that it’s not “okay” to label it the way you have suggested, instead it’s just that I believe there are more benefits to labeling slightly different ways. So your way still has benefits, just maybe not as many as another way.

A couple things to keep in mind though:

1) Punctuation — I wouldn’t use commas in a filename. It might work on the current operating system of the computer you are using, but most punctuation still doesn’t translate on various operating systems and makes. I would keep it to underscores “_” and dashes “-“. Spaces still don’t seem to work well on servers, which is why you will see these dashes and underscores in website names (files) instead of them. But, I use spaces in my filenames so I wouldn’t worry to much.

2) Sort Order — My preferred way to add a date to the head of a filename is yyyy-mm-dd. And yes this is partly because I grew up and live in the U.S. But, as you pointed out, we instead typically say or write our dates like “mm-dd-yyyy.” So we too have to force ourselves to writing out a date in a way that isn’t common to us.

The reason yyyy-mm-dd is the preferred method is because when you drop a group of photos in a folder for example, or a program like Picasa is accessing them, the method of sorting them will default to using the filename — starting with the first character and working to the right.

So if you have 2,000 photos, shot on various days and various years, with your suggested naming method, all photos shot on the day of the week Wednesday will sort together and “clump” together … as well other days of the week. Also, you will notice photos taken on Wed and Dec 25th on all years will also group together in a sort. I think more people see the benefit in having photos sort in the order they happened in people’s lives.

Labeling photos with the yyyy-mm-dd method, even though it will take time and you’ll almost have to “force” yourself to get used to it, will enable you to instantly sort your photos chronologically. But again, your suggested way is still SO much better than no date at all. I applaud you for making this a priority. So please just choose whichever way you find meets your personal goals and abilities. 🙂

Hi Karin. If you’ve already imported a photo or photos into Aperture, my opinion is that you want to update the name of the file (image) in the “Version Name” field. If you haven’t imported them, you can go into your Finder window and change the filenames as much as you want there. Then after you import them, this information will come through as both the “filename” AND the “Version Name.” Any additional changes you want to make, you then make to the “Version Name.”

The Version name and the “File Name” are the two most important fields for information like this because when you go to export out a photo from your collection, you will be asked which one of these two names you would like to use to “build” your new file from.

I like to keep both the Version Name and Filename (Original Name) the same. So, whatever I add to the Version Name, I later tell Aperture to update and “apply” it to my Original Name. But, if you would like to keep your version name and original file names unique for whatever reason, then avoid the step where you update the original filename with your new Version Name information. This will keep them different.

Nancy, really!? Too funny. Are they the cabinets in the photo of my brother and I standing on chairs from this particular post?

E, you’re so welcome. I’m happy to share them with you! It’s so great to hear they have helped give you a place to begin.

It may seem daunting, possibly even scary at times, but know its not impossible. You just have to start. 🙂

I’m sorry to hear about your Father’s passing. I bet your project will make both your parents proud.

It appears that NameChanger is a Mac only piece of software. But, because of it’s simplicity, it can’t be unique. I am sure there is a Windows substitute out there.

Art, I bet you probably even know of one that does the same if not very similar functions. If you aren’t aware of one, I am going to look for one to add to the review post so I don’t leave Windows users out.

Thanks for reading the blog Ken! I appreciate it.

I just downloaded “Namechanger” to try out. The demo video looked pretty nice. If it works out for me, I might make a review post about it. I’m sure others would like to find out about it as well.

Thanks for the comment. 🙂

Yup Art — I assure you there will be some follow-up posts! 😉

I crossed 3000 words on this post and knew I had to cut her off. It was just getting too long.

And really, I started out just wanting to make a single point and that is — “Consider ID’ing your originals or you could be really sorry” 🙂

Please school me on this one Art.

I thought about this for awhile when I settled on 5 digits for my ID number. But, I couldn’t think of 1 reason at all why my digital photos — the ones I take on my cell phone or DSLR for example — would need to have a unique ID number.

As thorough as I like to be, believe me, I tried to think of a reason to stay consistent and number them all. But, the number for me is just so I can “match back” to my originals.

Are there good reasons why someone would want to keep a unique number on their “current” digital images?

Thanks Art! I’m glad you enjoyed another one of my posts. 😉 All good comments you added. Let me first play devils advocate and defend the other side:

FILENAME LENGTH: The amount of characters is a filename being limited is a great point to bring up. I admit Mac OS X has spoiled me in that I don’t feel limited at all as to what characters I can use and how long I can make a filename. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever been told a filename I’ve chosen was too long. But, you’re right, others on a different platform or possibly an older version of the operating system may be hindered by my “file naming system” I recommend.

That being said, I personally feel that as we look towards the future, there is less concern for issues like this as we pass our collections on to our family members. Personal Computer operating systems are getting less restrictive with issues like this with every release. Not too long ago, we worried about file size and compression because our hard drives were too small, and this is no longer an issue at all.

I almost think most people don’t need to worry about this as long as they are reasonable. I mean, people should just keep it easy yet still useful.

METADATA FOR DESCRIPTIONS: I am still advising that most people consider putting some description in their filenames if they can because EXIF and IPTC metadata fields are still not universally used (and used well) by all software and understood well enough by the average user. This stuff is still more complicated for users than it should be!

What I mean is, for example, I still get a lot of questions about why when they drag a photo out of a program like iPhoto, their “titles” and “captions” are not included in this new file that was created to their desktop. And it’s not just iPhoto. As you probably know, a lot of software just keeps this metadata in a database and doesn’t actually write it to the master images as you make changes.

It seems like a lot of software is still written in a manner to KEEP you using it and not easily allowing you to take your photo collection and all of your “captioning” work with you. It’s like they write them like hotels in Vegas are made — you can get in easily but it’s hard to find your way out!

And secondly, for the average user, if they are looking at a folder of images on their hard drive that are just labeled: “1972-xx-xx-600dpi-12345” (I just made that up), it won’t be very useful for them. It will look like a foreign language unless they are in a thumbnail view and can actually SEE the photos. Even if it’s just the year and then the location like “Disney World”, that’s still something to go on in the filename.

However, if you stick with one piece of software that does everything you need to, and/OR you feel you have a handle on metadata and how it works — when and how it writes this new data to your master images — then I say people should have at it and do like you are suggesting Art. But then again, at this point, you are a fairly advanced user. 😉

So now let me take your side if you don’t mind. 🙂

If you noticed in that last image of this post, my version name for the dolphin photo in that info-graphic doesn’t include a date or a description at all. This is the data that I am currently using in my filenames before I import my scans into Aperture. Because, like you suggested, I am going to do keywording and captioning to fill in this data.

I will for sure, at the least, go back and add the dates to the head of the filename. But probably not until I get all of my photos in and they are organized so I am sure I have the dates right. That way I can add this information in as a “batch rewrite.”

Man Art, you and I write too much! We just might be boring people. 🙂

You are right about file names being too long. I have had problems several times when restoring files from a back-up to the same computer. I get error messages about a file name that is too long to be copied. Then I have to screen capture that message, skip the file and then after everything else has copied, I have to go back and hunt down those files and shorten the names so they can be moved. I find it annoying that my computer let me use names that were too long and then not allow them to be copied back later.

Though our system is not identical, reading this article in addition to your 3 part series just confirms how smart I was when I labeled every photo I scanned, and used that -5 digit, with leading zeros- number as my filename. I love organizing by date, and eventually I will likely add my dating system (yyyy-mm-dd) back into my filenames between “Scan_ and “#####”, but for now, I’m feeling pretty good about my index number system 🙂 Enjoying reading through your website and commenting on my own experiences, now that I’ve got some scanning and organizing history “under the belt”.