Photo import fail
If you have ever worked with me in a group where document collaboration is important, you know that I keep a close eye on filenames. Maintaining good, descriptive file names that can work well in any environment (don’t use spaces, use underscores!) isn’t hard to do and can save a lot of headaches when trying to track down the right document.
For me, this is especially true with photos. While photo managers like Picasa, iPhoto, Lightroom, and Aperture all have nice methods for organizing photos into albums, I find it important to keep order with original files and folders. This is especially useful when you want to select some photos to put online. Having left my Thinkpad in California, I thought I’d just use my MacBook to transfer my recent Diwali photos online.
In Windows, I use Windows Live Photo Gallery to import my photos, which allows me to quickly enter desired destination folder and filenames for different batches of photos (separated by time taken), all in one dialog box. That way my photos are automatically given a human-readable filename like “diwali 002″ instead of “IMG_9982.” To my dismay, I discovered that iPhoto doesn’t support the ability to rename the photo filenames upon import. Neither does Picasa for Mac. Nor does the built-in Image Capture utility in Mac OS X. So I found a freeware batch file re-namer and fixed the files after importing.
This makes me wonder: Am I just weird for refusing to simply accept photo filenames like IMG_5429.JPG? How come these hugely popular programs lack what I consider to be a necessary feature? I mean heck, the simple baked-in image importer utility in Windows XP had the functionality I desire, and yet Windows Vista decided to cripple it by not letting you rename the files on import. Fortunately the free Windows Live Photo Gallery not only restored it, but improved it. I think I must just be weird.
mary Said,
October 26, 2009 @ 7:21 pm
you’re weird but not for this :)
I’m kind of obsessive about file naming/organization too. Especially for my data files, but a little bit for photos too. For photos, I tend to mostly organize by a very complicated nested folder system rather than file names, but in lab, I have many nested folders, plus a detailed system for naming files so I can easily track back in my notebook to figure out what the conditions are for that data set and date.
biki Said,
November 2, 2009 @ 7:53 am
yeah .. i like files names to be organized n all .. i have a matlab script that does the batch renaming job for me .. also use it on old achieves to remove duplicate image files.. it so happens that while transferring images i dont clear the cam memory.. so end up double copying images sometimes .. so have scripts to do some of my cleaning work .. :)