So here’s a thing I’ve been struggling with. My personal photo filing system (see part 1 and part 2 of this mini-series) has worked brilliantly for years, except for one tiresome niggle.
I number my photos sequentially and yes, I can do that straight away with all my images straight from the camera.
BUT there are bound to be some duplicates and duds that I don’t need, so I’m either faced with keeping them forever anyway, or removing them later and having gaps in my file numbers.
So one answer would be for me to do an image cull before I do my batch renaming, but this takes time I often don’t have. Typically, it’s more important to get those images into my central catalog and start using and sharing them straight away, and any culling process will have to wait until I have more time.
But actually, the most important thing is that each filename is logical and unique. So the other answer is for me to just get over it and accept that there may be gaps in the file numbers!
So that’s what I did.
And that got me thinking some more, which led me to a fix for a couple of batch renaming problems I’ve had for a long time:
- When I’m testing a new camera, I’ll usually end up shooting RAW and JPEG files together, and often Adobe Bridge cannot recognise these new RAW files – updates usually follow some weeks after the initial camera launch. When this happens, Bridge doesn’t recognise that the JPEG and RAW files are part of a pair, and gives them different numbers. See ‘How to batch-rename RAW+JPEG pairs in Adobe Bridge’.
- Often, I want to experiment with effects and adjustments right away, without having to wait until I’ve done my batch renaming and image filing. The problem with that is that I end up with edited TIFFs and JPEGs based on the old camera filename, and if I batch renumber these in with the rest, they’ll get a different number to the original image, even though the image is the same.
You can use Adobe Bridge’s Batch Rename dialog to assemble new filenames from different components, but until now, I’ve been using a static text string followed by an automatic index number.
But the solution to both of my problems lies in one of the less obvious options in Adobe Bridge’s Batch Rename dialog, in fact it’s right down at the bottom of the menu – String Substitution.
Basically, String Substitution (1) is like Find/Replace in a word processor.
Now all digital camera filenames start with a fixed prefix, e.g. ‘DSC’, or ‘_912 in this case’ (2), followed by unique serial numbers. The trick is to find the static text/numbers at the start of the filename and replace this with the folder or ‘roll number’ from my own indexing system (3) (see part 1 of this mini-series), but still preserving the unique file numbers towards the end of the filename. Usefully, Adobe Bridge shows a preview (4) of the old and new file names.
This works because even though Adobe Bridge can’t make sense of new RAW file formats the camera obviously can, and will number them accordingly. So I can simply use the camera’s numbering as the second part of my new filenames.
And if I do create some new, edited versions of images before I carry out the renaming that’s fine, because the camera filenames I’m working on already have the sequential numbering I’m going to use later.
Job done!
