Bob, thanks this is similar to what I kind of had in mind and serves the way I work and what I do quite well. It's not until you start looking into this that you realise that it can take some planning to work out what may or not work long term, plus one system will not work for everyone. Thanks all for the insight. Cheers
Simon Plant plantphoto.com -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Bob Smith Sent: 20 June 2004 15:20 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PRODIG] digital file naming workflow On Jun 20, 2004, at 7:53 AM, planty wrote: > What I want to do is set up a file naming system where I can trace the > images easily back to raw if needed. > Can anyone tell me how their system is set up? I shoot mostly commercial work... products, locations, people.... for use in catalogs and such. I've been fully digital for several years now and tried a number of different schemes. The current method seems to be most universally useful and is holding up over time. The first thing I do after a shoot is to rough edit the raw files to cull out the images that obviously can't be used. I do this before renaming just so that when showing proofs later the client doesn't see gaps in the numbering sequence and wonder what they're missing. I then rename the keeper raw files with a number representing year/month/date; a dash; brief text to indicate the client of subject; dash; then a sequential number. If I was doing a shoot today for Prodig the file names would look like: 040620-Prodig-001.dcr I prefer using the client name but some clients insist on a simple product identifier here. The date is a must. Otherwise over time I end up with too many similarly named files when I've photographed the same product for the same client several times. Having the date in the filename is more universally useable and less prone to errors than relying on file creation date or EXIF data to determine the most recent versions. An artist linking images to a layout only looks at the file name. They'd call up an ask for a copy of widget-02.tif from my archive. After a length of time shooting for this client I'd find that I have several files with the same name in the archive. That's when I decided to start adding the date. It helps a lot. I've taken to labeling the disks that I deliver and archive in a similar fashion. Each client has a three letter code like maybe PRD for Prodig. The disk is then labeled by client code, date code and sequential number (for multiple disks delivered on one day) PRD-040620-01 When a client calls and asks for another version of an image I delivered on disk number xxx... I immediately know whether this is something I prepped a few weeks ago or a couple of years ago... and considering how things change over time, thats often a quick indicator of how easy their request will be to fill. hope that helps... I welcome all comments and suggestions to fine tune this Bob Smith =============================================================== GO TO http://www.prodig.org for ~ GUIDELINES ~ un/SUBSCRIBING ~ ITEMS for SALE =============================================================== GO TO http://www.prodig.org for ~ GUIDELINES ~ un/SUBSCRIBING ~ ITEMS for SALE
