Thursday 28 February 2019

What are those long filenames?

If you look at any of my images at Flickr, or on some sites such as TalkPhotography.co.uk, you may see long filenames such as 

1385 16 2018_09_27 P1550950_DxO SP7 LR7 1400h 

or 

1401 12 P1000535 G9+60 PF6K 81f ISO ISO 400 F2.8 1-160 A8,4+innerB8,4 LR7 1400h

The first part of the name lets me find the original of the image if I want to rework it. The rest of the name tells me something about how I produced the image.

I gather my images into sets, each of which has an identifying number, for example 1385 and 1401 in this case. I have a spreadsheet which lists these numbers and gives the title for each set. 


Almost all of these sets are uploaded as albums to my Flickr account. The second number is the sequence number of the image within the set.

The information in the rest of the name can include information such as:

  • The filename of the original (which may be a raw file, JPEG image or video)
  • What applications I used to process the file. In the first example, DXO Optics Pro/PhotoLab, Silkypix and Lightroom
  • The size the processed file was outputted, 1400 pixels high in these two examples
  • For stacks, some additional information (Exif data gets lost during stack processing). In the second example this includes the gear (Panasonic G9 with Olympus 60mm macro lens), the fact it was captured using 6K video of which 81 frames were stacked, the ISO, aperture and shutter speed, and what stacking method(s) I used and the parameters for those methods, in this case a combination of Helicon Focus methods A and B.

I have changed the information I put in filenames over the years and so they are not consistent and I can't give a definitive list of abbreviations. For some of the earlier ones I can't even remember what one or two of the abbreviations refer to.

I could of course use a digital asset management system (DAM) to keep some or all of this information, which would make it easier to find things. I could for example use Lightroom for this. However, I change the software I use from time to time and over the years I have learnt not to store my data in proprietary formats that I may be unable easily to transfer to a different software product. As a result I use just the basic folder and file naming facilities offered by Windows.

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