Renaming pictures - Best Practices

Question

What are the most frequent and effective Best Practices to correctly rename personal pictures, maybe grounded on official documentation?

For instance, a possible solution is to rename pictures using this format:

yyyy-mm-dd_001

but in case of pictures taken on different days but belonging to the same folder (i.e. the same photographic campaign, trip. etc.), should they be renamed starting from _001 every day? I am focusing only on 'archival' renaming, I assume that any other information about the picture is managed using keywords and/or other metadata.

Advices should fit a personal photographic archive but suggestion from professional archival practices are welcome.

Answer 1

There are no "best practices". The picture number from the camera is as valid as anything else.

Your proposed date scheme will definitely create clashes if you use more than one camera. My phone uses a down-to-the-millisecond timestamp as the file name which is much less likely to create clashes if you want to go that route.

A good photo manager should be able to retrieve pictures using metadata, which includes the EXIF (including date/time), and any tag that you could add.

Personally, I keep the original camera filename, but keep pictures in folders /directories(*) with the date and the subject (2024-08-28 Eiffel tower/IMG_8492.JPG). This makes it quite easy for me to retrieve about any picture, and in case of dire need, as an IT person I can come up with convoluted commands to retrieve pictures on about any criterion.

(*) Whatever you do, you need folders because the performance of many things degrades when you reach a few thousands files in the same folder, especially on windows. .

Answer 2

I do not think there is best practice for renaming photos. I use a bit different approach, I create tree which can help me find particular photo based on the time and location. The structure looks like:

Country (I use ISO codes)
   City
      YYYYMMDD

or if I make more often photos on particular location:

Country (I use ISO codes)
   City
      YYYY
          YYYYMM99

This help me (most of the times) to avoid image name duplications and apply geolocations much faster.

Of course my way may be not appropriate for you, feel free to change it :)

Answer 3

My Nikon camera uploads files into folders with numbers and images are of the format DSC_0001.JPG. For example, an upload creates a folder "01" and 8 files from different dates in it as "DSC_0001.JPG" to "DSC_0008.JPG". Sometimes the file type is also of RAW format, for example "DSC_0008.NEF".

At the basic level, the archiving can have the folder based upon the session/campaign/trip with files renamed with original folder name + original file name + date shot. For example: "DSC_0008.JPG" in folder "01" is renamed to "01-DSC_0008-2024_07_25.JPG" in the same folder, or into a new folder with the session/campaign/trip name, for example "picnic_july_2024".

I have found that a renamed file or a copy of the file with some identification - based on original folder, file, custom text and exif photo shot date - some combination of these is useful sometimes.

One common scenario I found was not knowing the when and what session was it - that is which folder has these. I would like to rename or make copy of some photos using the same info. Based on these I am developing my own tool (started recently, and is work in progress). Presently, its GUI looks like this:

The GUI shows possible options for renaming files. The next feature I am adding to it is making copies of files with similar options.

The date info is the photo's exif metadata value for "DateTimeOriginal" (the shot taken timestamp). The program is written in Java programming language. It uses a freely available external library (Apache Commons Imaging) to extract the exif meta data.

At this point I don't know if this tool makes any sense for others. I am still new to photography and this is based upon my limited experience. It is also for learning aspects of photos and photography. So far what I had developed works fine. In future, it is possible I may make it available to others as a freely available tool.

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[Update 30-Sep-2024]

I have my program available for trying. It is an improved version of the above picture. You can download from the web page: photo_image_file_utility .