My current file naming practice (to my Arch Linux box) is to ~/Pictures/topicname/YYYY/YYYYMMDD/filename as I like to file under topics and use meta data searches to find groups of similar pix, e.g topicname can be wildlife, history, people, events, etc etc and the filename is from the camera.
There is just one mod I would like to make, which is to ensure file names cannot be duplicated. Reading your (excellent principles, a little short on very specific detail) docs about how to do this I’d like to prepend the filename with the sequence number of files handled by RPD.
Is this as simple as adding the number of digits I want to add in the “Rename” section where it says “Stored Number”? Or am I chasing up the wrong track?
If I were you I would prefix the photo name with the date and time, and use a “downloads today” counter. The “stored number” is more useful if your goal is to index photos over an extended time period, which is not something many people need to do.
I’d use
~/Pictures/topicname/YYYY/YYMMDD/YYMMDD-HHMMSS-filename
Including date and time with the camera-generated filename makes the names unique for practical purposes. (I have never had a filename clash in well over a decade of storing image files.)
Thanks, Damon. “Stored number” is exactly what I want from your description as well as my own.
I think I’ve found it. Creating a “customer number” by using the dropdowns to get number-only image numbers and stored number sequence numbers, then swapping the order so sequence # first.
Now I just have to take a few more shots and download them to see if it works. What I already have can stay as-is. There aren’t any duplicates and adding the sequence number will make all the new ones different anyway.
Unique filenames are extremely useful for several reasons. Camera generated filenames are not. They have no meaning at all. There is no point to keeping them. It’s better to use sequence numbers to generate unique filenames.
Ha - wasn’t aware of that one. Not to worry, I too can afford to wait a little while and it’s October now, so end of year not too far away. I’ll stick with it for a while and see what happens. The option is still open to switch if it becomes tedious.
