I bought Nikki a new Lumix camera for her birthday - she's been hampered for a while by the limited zoom on her old Ixus and envious of the 12x optical zoom on my (older) Lumix, so I thought I'd treat her - and I noticed the other day when copying some photos off her (new, 16GB) card, something that should have been obvious right from the start: the two cameras use identical file naming formats.
This could have been an issue leading to all sorts of photographic clashes and mixups, but for two things. Firstly, we file all our photos chronologically, in top-level folders named 2005, 2006, etc, so unless there was a chance of her "catching me up" it's unlikely that two pictures with the same filename will end up in the same folder. We just have to remember not to change the filing system to be, for example, topic-based.
The second factor is the precise extent of the remoteness of that chance that Nikki will catch me up. I have something like a 6-year head start with my Lumix and I was astonished to find, by comparing recent file names, that in those six years I've taken around 110,000 photos. The wonders of digital photography, eh? If I'd taken that many with my old 35mm film camera it would have cost me something over £25,000.
I'm guessing that there'll be a low-level option somewhere to adjust the file name convention but in light of the above we probably don't need to bother. Let's hope those aren't famous last words.
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3 comments:
I generally use the Windows function that transfers photos from the camera to the puter and that gives you the option of giving the lot a name to which it adds sequence numbers starting with 001. i.e. "Reunion" I have on occasion just bunged them all in there from the card using the default file names too. I think there's an option you can reset the filename on the camera but not sure if you can actually change it's default name. I had a lumix as well and am on a Canon now. If i recall, the Lumix used DSC, the Canon uses IMG and i think my ancient sony just starts them all with a P.
For such problems, I use a program called "Bulk File Renamer"
http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk
It is simply brilliant for placing nice little prefixes on filenames, or other fab stuff... tiny, too :)
I've heard of that, Annie.
I tend to just put my pictures in a file called "pictures", create a new folder for whatever I was doing, then point Picasa to it.
Works for me.
I'm all for the ability to access everything equally for whatever OS you happen to be using. The Net should be neutral.
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