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Picture naming and sorting

Started by MNHighwayMan, April 02, 2017, 02:48:08 PM

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MNHighwayMan

Particularly those of you who do a lot of highway photography: how do you guys do it - what's your system? I have my pictures sorted into folders based on state and highway but I can't seem to decide upon a satisfactory scheme for naming each picture, so most of them still have the default name. That can make it tough to find specific pictures sometimes.


DaBigE

I don't have a huge collection, so I do the same way you do, leaving the default names, then use large thumbnail images when I need to find something again. Have you thought about using tags?
"We gotta find this road, it's like Bob's road!" - Rabbit, Twister

wanderer2575

I have a folder for each state and then my general naming convention uses the route, direction, intersecting route (if there is one), sometimes the city or county, and a sequence number if I have multiple photos of signs in the same area/junction.  This keeps all my routes sorted within a state.  I might add additional terms toward the end of the name, for example:  "error" if it's a signing error (I'll usually also include the date I shot the photo) or "old" if I took a picture of a newer redesigned sign but decided to also keep the photo of the old sign.  I have very few photos that aren't signs so this works well for me.  For example:

BusI94e_at_BusI69_PortHuron
US12w_Clinton
I96e_at_US131s_GrandRapids_2
I96e_at_US131s_GrandRapids_3_old

I also have folders for photos of roadwork signs and non-routeshield photos.  I'll also set up subfolders within any of these if the whim arises -- for example, my Michigan photos are divided between Upper and Lower peninsula subfolders, and I included subfolders within my roadwork folder for photos of the I-96 and I-275 reconstruction projects from the past few years because I had lots of photos of each.

When I take a roadtrip, I usually create a folder for just those photos and I don't rename them because (1) I'm too lazy to confront having to rename a couple hundred photos and (2) by leaving them as is they remain sorted in the order I shot them, which makes for a crude trip log.

Max Rockatansky

#3
I have about 700 albums, about 600 on my Flickr account which would be travel related.  Generally I start my folder name with the year and add a description after.  I'm generally not too picky about sorting things by month so it could be as simple as something like "2016 US 550" or something like that.  I generally try to break up my albums as much as possible so I'm not lumping a ton of subject matters into one folder, makes things less confusing for me.  For the most part I leave individual file names alone unless I'm trying to splice an album together from multiple cameras.  I have a couple shield albums I do by; route number, route type, and a letter to indicate the order of the files.  So for an example the fifth picture of any given year for CA 198 would be "198CAe."

formulanone

#4
I upload a bunch of them to Flickr; I don't use the default file name, because it doesn't mean anything to me (and a pet peeve). I'll use the tag system in Flickr, and sort them by state/province for albums. I'll tag with something obvious like {I-95}, {state}, {TN56}, {US77}, {CR42} as examples. I'll throw in numbers because we've been playing so many number games lately. Or {city/town}, {button copy} or whatever else catches my eye.

There's not much order from there; I get a bit scatterbrained, since I hop around to so many different places that I re-check what I've photographed and know what I'd like to re-take, get something I missed, or find something different. So sometimes I'll "process" three pictures in one day, and another might yield 100 uploads from a week's work. Or I just upload whatever random shot I have time for (or forgot).

The naming convention I'll use for photos is ridiculous, but it works for me. Look at a few in my Flickr and see if you can follow along, because an explanation borders on absurd. They're either very obvious to the layman, or need some decoding. Some just have weird titles because I felt like it.

AsphaltPlanet

#5
I don't sort my photos by state when they are on my own personal harddrive.  I just sort them by the date that I downloaded the memory card... but I do tend to download the cards fairly regularly.  When I do a longer trip, I typically will generate more than one memory card dump worth of photos.  In that case, I will name the folder based on the trip but also include a note about where the photos started based on the file name.

I have my own cryptic photo naming convention for things that I upload to my website.  I number my photos based on the mileage from the start of the highway.  So for example a photograph of the eastbound sign for exit number 123 on Interstate 20 in Texas taken in December, 2017 would be numbered as follows:
I20_TX_dv_123_east_Dec17.jpg
Interstate#_State-or-Province_type-of-photo_mileage-from-start-of-highway_direction_date-taken.jpg
AsphaltPlanet.ca  Youtube -- Opinions expressed reflect the viewpoints of others.

shadyjay

I have folders within my Pictures library for states... one for CT, MA, RI, VT, NH, etc.  Then within those folders are subfolders for the individual routes... I-95, US 1, CT 9, etc.  If I want I-95 pictures in Maine, I have to go into the ME folder to see those.  I use the same format for my FLICKR page as well.

For naming of individual pics, for Exit 2, NB.... I'd use "NB-Exit 02".  For multiple signs for an exit, it'd be "NB-Exit 02-1", "NB-Exit 02-2", etc.  If a pic is a view between two exits (between Exits 2 and 3, NB, for example, it'd be "NB-Exit 02-03".  I try to use the same naming style on my FLICKR page, but some I haven't gotten around to modifying. 


oscar

#7
For digital photos (most everything from 2007 and later), I use folders for each year, and within each year subfolders for date taken. Usually I'll include in the subfolder name a clue about what I photographed on that day. 

For non-digital photos, I'd have separate boxes covering one or more years, and within each box packets for the film rolls they came from, sometimes marked with the dates the photos were taken. Sometimes the rolls have overlapping dates, since when I was shooting film I usually alternated between two cameras with different kinds of film (now that I've gone digital, just one camera plus sometimes a backup body). In addition to the boxes of prints, I've taken the negatives, and slides when I was shooting that kind of firm on occasion from about 2003-2007, and put them in archival-quality sleeves in binders, kept in a storage unit along with multiple backups of my digital photos and other files. That avoids total loss from a fire or other disaster, and also helps for a few rolls of film where I've lost either the prints or the negatives.

When I edit digital photos to go on this forum or a website, I'll create a somewhat descriptive name, plus the image number as it came out of the camera. Otherwise, there is no organization, not even subfolders. So my www.alaskaroads.com web space includes in one folder Alaska photos, road photos from elsewhere, (except Hawaii and Puerto Rico, on www.hawaiihighways.com), and photos on what used to be on my personal and hot springs sites before they were hastily moved when Comcast stopped providing free web space.
my Hot Springs and Highways pages, with links to my roads sites:
http://www.alaskaroads.com/home.html

Jim

Mine are organized by date, all managed by a homegrown set of programs and scripts that build the HTML around them.
Photos I post are my own unless otherwise noted.
Signs: https://www.teresco.org/pics/signs/
Travel Mapping: https://travelmapping.net/user/?u=terescoj
Counties: http://www.mob-rule.com/user/terescoj
Twitter @JimTeresco (roads, travel, skiing, weather, sports)

epzik8

I do state as the first level. Second in my hierarchy is county. So you could open my highway pictures folder and click any state, and by greeted by a series of folders reserved specifically for each county in that state.

Each county folder in each state folder is then made up of three folders marked Interstate, U.S. Highway and State Route. In other words, I divide interstates and U.S. routes (and state routes in many cases) in every state into segments based on county. And then finally, I split those folders into northbound/southbound or eastbound/westbound folders.

Note that I've only taken road pictures in the United States, but I'm hoping to someday cover highways in such countries as Canada and Mexico, so if and when I expand my coverage outside of the USA, the first level in my hierarchy would become national, then the second level would be state/province, et cetera.
From the land of red, white, yellow and black.
____________________________

My clinched highways: http://tm.teresco.org/user/?u=epzik8
My clinched counties: http://mob-rule.com/user-gifs/USA/epzik8.gif

kphoger

FWIW, I gave up trying to find Eric Stuve's recent pictures after he made the switch to Flickr.
Keep right except to pass.  Yes.  You.
Visit scenic Orleans County, NY!
Male pronouns, please.

Quote from: Philip K. DickIf you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.

Ian

In all honesty, I've gotten really lazy in the past few years when I've been uploading my road photos to Flickr. I usually don't touch the title unless I'm putting it into a group, and my captions are usually something along the lines of "I-95 northbound approaching exit 186 in Bangor," and that's it (unless there's something else unique about what's in the photo, like a sign error or something). Also, the albums I create on Flickr aren't by what highway they're on, but what state they're in. For example, my New Mexico album just has a lot of random highway related photos from various roads around the state.
UMaine graduate, former PennDOT employee, new SoCal resident.
Youtube l Flickr

Duke87

I store all my photos chronologically, and maintain a table of contents in rtf format.

I leave the sequential file names assigned by the camera intact and start a new folder every thousand photos.
If you always take the same road, you will never see anything new.

AsphaltPlanet

Does anyone manage their photos in Lightroom?

If so, what are their experiences?  I have a copy of it (it came with photoshop), and I've never really gotten used to it, despite a lot of really positive reviews from people around the internet.
AsphaltPlanet.ca  Youtube -- Opinions expressed reflect the viewpoints of others.

MNHighwayMan

I thought Lightroom was more a program for fixing white balance, saturation, etc, and less of a file sorting and management system.

AsphaltPlanet

^ I think it's kind of both.  It allows for simple corrections to made like that, but when you launch the program it expects you to import collections of photos into the program rather than dragging and dropping singular pictures as you would in photoshop.
AsphaltPlanet.ca  Youtube -- Opinions expressed reflect the viewpoints of others.

Ian

Quote from: AsphaltPlanet on May 06, 2017, 08:37:15 PM
Does anyone manage their photos in Lightroom?

If so, what are their experiences?  I have a copy of it (it came with photoshop), and I've never really gotten used to it, despite a lot of really positive reviews from people around the internet.

I use Lightroom to edit a bunch of my photos, and I love it. It lets me turn photos like this...



into this...

UMaine graduate, former PennDOT employee, new SoCal resident.
Youtube l Flickr

Max Rockatansky

^^^

What kind of camera are you using to get those night shots?

dgolub

I organize the pictures for my site into folders based on state, then category (one for each route system), and then route.  For example, ny/suffolk/cr97 is for CR 97 under Suffolk County Routes under New York State, while nj/njstate/nj35 is for NJ 35 under US and State Routes under New Jersey.

Within each folder, I assign each pictures a filename that consists of the route number, followed by one letter indicating the compass direction, followed by the exit number, an underscore, and an index of the picture.  For example, 95n07_03.jpg is the third picture of exit 7 on I-95 northbound.  For routes that don't have exit number, I just omit the exit number and underscore.  For example, 25e00123.jpg is the 123rd picture of NY 25 eastbound.  For archived pictures of things that no longer exist, I insert the word "old" after the compass direction and omit the exit number.  For example, 95nold008.jpg is the eighth archived picture of I-95 northbound.

The system has served me pretty well over the years.  The one drawback is that I have to deal with shifting the numbers up on roads without exit numbers when I add pictures of sections that were missing.  I have a script to do this automatically when I need to do it for more than a few pictures.

froggie

For digital photo storage, I group mine chronologically by month.  Naming convention depends on which camera I had/used...earlier cameras were left at the default.  The Nikon's I've had since 2009 use a DSCNxxxx.JPG format, where I'll replace the "N" with the following letter every 10,000 photos...currently at "T" and will probably hit "U" this summer.

Lost all of my earlier film photos to a hurricane.  Some of the road photos were scanned in by my wife during the deployment I had before said hurricane....those were named/numbered in the order they were scanned (i.e. Picturexxxx.jpg).

For most of my photos, in addition to keeping it chronological by month, I've also broken them down by state.  Sub-folders exist for photos that are bike/ped path or "research" related (the latter mainly photo scans of EIS and other planning documents).  Separate folders exist for state line crossings (further subdivided by which state line and which road/route) and non-road-related photos.

Ian

Quote from: Max Rockatansky on May 07, 2017, 07:54:15 AM
^^^

What kind of camera are you using to get those night shots?

I have a Nikon D5100 that I use for almost all of my photography. It's only an entry level DSLR and I'm looking to upgrade to something better a little bit down the road, but it's treated me very well in the ~5 years that I've had it. I also used my Rokinon 8mm fisheye lens for this particular photo.
UMaine graduate, former PennDOT employee, new SoCal resident.
Youtube l Flickr

Alex

Quote from: MNHighwayMan on April 02, 2017, 02:48:08 PM
Particularly those of you who do a lot of highway photography: how do you guys do it - what's your system? I have my pictures sorted into folders based on state and highway but I can't seem to decide upon a satisfactory scheme for naming each picture, so most of them still have the default name. That can make it tough to find specific pictures sometimes.

For my photo archives/hard drives. I have them separated in folders named by date, with a description or place name list separated by underscores. For January my folder index is:
2017_01_01_richmond_to_savannah
2017_01_13_u0019a_s0589
2017_01_14_phl_to_newark
2017_01_15_de_rte_clinch_day1
2017_01_16_de_rte_clinch_day2
2017_01_17_de_to_rochester_ny
2017_01_18_rochester_ny_to_de
2017_01_19_phl_aerials

I keep all original photos, and don't rename them.

For the site, I have a file naming system that breaks down photos by region, then state, then route number. An example is Montana where we have:
montana012 - pics of US 12, and anything that might be numbered 13 and 14 would go here
montana015 - pics of Interstate 15 or Business Loop I-15
when we add photos of a route between 16 and 89, we'd make a new folder(s) and have them here
montana090 - pics of just Interstate 90 or Business Loop I-90
montana093 - pics of just US 93
montana094
montana100
montana200
montana999 - photos covering roads without names, or photos of landscapes, etc.

Similar to what David (dgolub) wrote, the naming convention we have is based upon route, direction, exit number or intersection or county line, etc
i-094_eb_exit_213_01.jpg - route direction exit number, number of photo in order
mt-135_nb_after_old_hwy_10.jpg - route, direction; approach; at; after, route or street or other intersected/crossed
us-285_nb_at_pine_jct.jpg - route, direction, at city/county/state line

then sometimes we go with something more basic
in-046_eb_brown_069.jpg
in-046_eb_brown_072.jpg
in-046_eb_brown_073.jpg - Indiana 46 east at Brown County, where the order was just the original file name IMG_069, IMG 072, etc
or
us-034_eb_rocky_mtn_np_01.jpg
us-034_eb_rocky_mtn_np_02.jpg
us-034_eb_rocky_mtn_np_03.jpg etc

hbelkins

My camera saves pictures in folders by date. I will generally insert the SD card into the built-in slot on my MacBook Pro, then copy the entire folder and rename it to reflect the trip's subject (ex: 2017 February WV Trip Day 1). I'll go through the photos and delete any that didn't come out right (out of focus, motion blur, not framed well, etc.) and then I import the pictures into iPhoto. I will crop and make other adjustments as needed, then export the set into a new folder. I use the iPhoto function to rename the photos sequentially with the name of the set, and then will upload to Facebook or Flickr, or both. I save both sets (the original and the renamed iPhoto exports) on an external drive and I have usually had them on my MacBook when I do a Time Machine backup. So I have at least four sets of photos from each day.


Government would be tolerable if not for politicians and bureaucrats.

Eth

My system is...frankly not very good. Photography is really something that I only just started doing in the last year or so, so my collection isn't all that large yet - just under 1,000 photos sitting in a single album in Google Photos (backed up there directly from my phone).

When I do actually decide to use a photo for something, I download it from there onto my PC for post-processing (usually just cropping and resizing) and then give it a name. Route and direction, followed by intersecting route (if any) or exit number, or anything else relevant. Some sample names include:

ga53e_ga9 - a photo on GA 53 eastbound at the intersection with GA 9
ga400n_marta - a photo of the access ramp from GA 400 to the North Springs MARTA station, taking while traveling northbound
i75n_exit249b - I-75/85 (I only use one route number in the name) northbound at the Peachtree/Pine St exit
i575n_end_closeup - a closeup of the END signage on I-575 northbound

Lately, since I've been playing the various photo games here, I've also set up a few folders ("names", "numbers", and "streets") with photos in them named for ease of identification of what I've already used ("atlanta", "ga155", "ashford-dunwoody", etc.)

Duke87

Quote from: Ian on May 07, 2017, 12:41:57 PM
Quote from: Max Rockatansky on May 07, 2017, 07:54:15 AM
^^^

What kind of camera are you using to get those night shots?

I have a Nikon D5100 that I use for almost all of my photography. It's only an entry level DSLR and I'm looking to upgrade to something better a little bit down the road, but it's treated me very well in the ~5 years that I've had it. I also used my Rokinon 8mm fisheye lens for this particular photo.

I'm curious as to what kind of settings you're using. Getting good nighttime shots has always been a struggle for me.
If you always take the same road, you will never see anything new.



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