Naming Convention for Photos

For my own uses, I am adopting the following convention for file names. This should hold up for all of the digital photos taken by myself and others decades into the future as well as for any print photos from decades in the past scanned from many sources.

The key element is to name the photos by time. For digital camera photos, the exact time is available through the exif tag, so jhead or some other tool can be used to extract it and rename the file. For scans where the exact time is not known, approximate dates, times, or even seasons can be used, as well as a scan sequence number.

To allow for photos from multiple people, each photo has a suffix with the initials or other identifing tag of the source.

The general form is as follows:

   [date]_[time-or-sequence]_[personal-id].jpg

The DATE is written in year, month, day format, with some options for just narrowing it down to months, years, or seasons as below. If you want to specify a range like "Sometime Sept 2-Oct 10, 1985" just do it in your description, and make the date "1985_fal" or "198509xx"

The TIME-OR-SEQUENCE is written in hour, minute, second format with options to narrow it as below. If it is one of many scanned photos from a particular event, you can use a scan sequence number instead of the form s00001, s00002, s00003, etc.

The PERSONAL-ID should just be your initials or some other tag. For manageability, it is best to keep it around three letters.

So here are some examples.

20030124_242902_dtl.jpg

From digital cameras, date followed by time in 24hour format, followed by three initials to identify the originator. The time includes the seconds so we can have multiple photos per minute.

20030124_s00001_dtl.jpg

Scanned traditional photos, date followed by a scan serial number prefixed with an "s" and followed by the three initials

The jhead tool can do this renaming for you automatically based on EXIF timestamp information in digital camera files. The command line invocation is as follows. Windows uses % for shell variables so we need to double it (%%) on Win98 to make them happy. For some reason WinXP command shells do not need it doubled, probably Win2k too, but I have not tested that.

 Windows 98  --> jhead -n%%Y%%m%%d_%%H%%M%%S_dtl  file.jpg    
 Unix, WinXP --> jhead -n%Y%m%d_%H%M%S_dtl  file.jpg    

 jhead -ta+1:00 *.jpg    --> adds one hour to the exif timestamp

In general, scanned photos should always have a date, but can then be named based on the time if known, or a serial number if not. When the value is not known, "x" should be used to signal approximate values.

20030124_09xxxx_dtl.jpg -- Picture with approximate time (~9am)
200301xx_s00001_dtl.jpg -- Picture from sometime in january
197x1225_s00001_dtl.jpg -- Picture from some christmas in the 70s

The following convention can also be used to narrow things down to a season:

2003_spr_s00001_dtl.jpg -- Scanned picture from sometime in spring

	"_spr"		sometime in spring
	"_sum"		sometime in summer
	"_fal"		sometime in fall
	"_win"		sometime in winter

2019-09-09 -- This is not close to ISO 8601, so it really does not work well. ISO 8601 says to drop the date for months (1972-05 for May of 1972) but just using 00 for the date seems to be well tolerated.