Blog Of Rick Pepper

My goal in this post it to highlight what I think is an oversight by most digital camera manufacturers, except Olympus. And then to offer a free tool that may be helpful for making the most of your images for the sake of a more intuitive workflow. I also want to highlight a piece of software that I use in my workflow that really streamlines the task of previewing and rejecting bad images.

UPDATE
So, I live under a rock right? It was brought to my attention that Adobe Photoshop Elements does a bunch of whiz-bang stuff like this and more and will soon be available for both platforms in version 6. I don’t live under a rock, but since I already have a working solution I haven’t been on the lookout for other solutions, especially for a fee. If I had the $$$ to throw at it I would likely purchase iView MediaPro.
END UPDATE

So here’s the rub: if you don’t buy into using the camera manufacturers workflow, meaning, you don’t use their software to get the images off the camera but instead use either your own filing system or iPhoto or Aperture on the Mac or something like iView MediaPro (now owned by Microsoft and named “Microsoft Expression Media”), in a short amount of time you end up with 50 files named “IMG_001.JPG”. A completely useless file name, no idea what (or more important to me is when) it was, and it’s only a matter of time before you overwrite one of them with a different image named the same thing. However, my first digi-cam was an Olympus C-2020Z. Olympus is the exception to this naming debacle, and IMO they get it. They use a file naming convention that tells you the date the photo was taken. Right off the bat you have meaningful data just in the file name, and secondly you have far fewer opportunities for file name collision – though I have had it happen, which is the reason for a feature of the tool I’m going to offer here for free. It’s an AppleScript which runs under OS X 10.3 and 10.4, and may run under 10.2 as well. It does require this free OSAX (think of it as a Plug-in for AppleScript), but can be wired to not need it without a marked reduction in functionality. Olympus’ file naming works like this: P5171289.jpg would tell me it was taken in May (second digit, which uses 1-9 and A,B,C for the 12 months) on the 17th (characters 3 and 4.) I am at a loss for why they wasted one character on a “P”, so it’s a photo… like the .jpg extension didn’t hint at that already, whatever. And then 4 digits that rollover after varying points, depending on the camera (1289 in this example.) I think the C-2020Z rolls over at 1600 or something like that, my C8080 goes higher I think. First I set out to add the year as a prefix to all file names to virtually guarantee I wouldn’t have a file name collision. So P5171289.JPG becomes 07_P5171289.JPG since it was taken in 2007. Secondly, I started working with other cameras that weren’t Olympus’ and decided that prefixes such as IMG_, _MG_, IM000, IM00, IM0, DSCF_, DSCN_, DSCF, DSCN, CRW_ were an insult to me as a user and then added the ability for the script to re-format all those names into the Olympus format, minus the “P”. This does allow me to see at a glance which photos were taken on my Canon vs. my Olympus’, but it was just the idea of a letter that meant nothing to me so I left it off. So _MG_0087.JPG becomes 07_5170087.JPG assuming it was taken on the same day as our previous example.

How it works: Copy your photos onto your hard drive – and I recommend using a media reader, then drag and drop them onto the script. You will be prompted with a dialog that allows you to specify what you want done. I made the default to just add the year and conform names to the Olympus format by just hitting Enter on this dialog.

If you select “Prefix” it will re-format to the Olympus format, no year, and then prefix that with whatever you enter in the dialog and an underscore. If you click “Both” you get prefix _ year _ file name.extension. This script will work on JPEG, TIFF or RAW formats, it retains whatever the extension was in the original file name.

This does bring up a caveat that all digital camera users should be paying attention to anyway: make sure you keep your clock set correctly on the camera. Otherwise you’ll end up with a bunch of files that start with 00_101 – 00 for the year 2000, 01 for January and 01 for the 1st, at least that’s how my Olympus’ behave. Something like this could be written in .NET for Windows if you know anyone that programs in .NET or good old fashioned VB Script.

Another vital part of my image workflow is PhotoReviewer by Stick Software. I am still using v1.4 for it’s straight-forwardness and sheer speed (MDD G4), but the current version is 2.1. Here are the controls in v1.4:



You can use it for numerous things including making copies of specific images based on review, doing a scan through new photos off of your camera (the main purpose) to quickly delete the duds. I did experience a known bug under OS X 10.3 with a memory leak over time, which requires a reboot to purge. It behaves better in 10.4 though I don’t think it’s perfect. I highly recommend it especially for the price. It’s worth a hundred times that for the hard drive space it will save you that would otherwise be consumed by unusable or indifferent photos.