So, you got one of those newfangled digital cameras for Christmas and have been shooting like a madman. Great. You appropriately make the observation, Shoot, digital photography is cheap compared to regular film. I can shoot all day without worrying about how much film Ive wasted.

OK, this totally makes sense to the casual observer. I mean, how can you not argue with the total lack of consumable expenditures when youre actively shootingrechargeable batteries, compact flash cards. I mean, you can shoot all day as long as you have power and storage. You have the freedom to explore like youve never before, and, not surprisingly, youll probably make more keepers than you ever did before. Youll want to keep all those gems. But wait, youre shooting more and youre keeping more than ever. That points to a huge number of pictures. It sure does, no question about it. Along with finding a place to store all these masterpieces, you now have to find a way to catalog them. Otherwise, searching for the beautiful image of Aunt Bessie dunking for apples at your last family get-together becomes an exercise in archeology. The basic ingredient for the solution of this problem is simply naming your files.
Its that easy.

Im going to show you in this articlequick as it ishow I choose my file numbering system and how I use it. (Note: I came up with this system years ago, before the digital revolution. At the precipice of film foolery, before jumping wholly into photographybefore I had a zillion slidesI struggled for weeks on how I could manage my future hoard of images. I wanted a system that would pass the test of time. I also needed something that wasnt too difficult to use, yet simple enough to implement within a workflow. It was all about efficient processes to keep me shooting more and geeking less.

I use a FileMaker Pro Databaseself-designed by yours truly, thank you very muchthat has a record for every single photograph Ive made the last three years. All together, it has more than 13,000 separate records for every image Ive ever made. Thats a lot and its pretty much as I expected way back when. Unfortunately, FileMaker Pro isnt that user-friendly for data manipulation. In my case, it means copying the same data from field to field becomes a huge chore. When you have 40 Western Gull portraits on the same pier, taken at the same time, in the same conditions, it makes sense to just copy and paste. You may be even better served to fill down like you can in Excel. Shoot, how about asking for the moon, now that I think about it. How about filling down in sequence. That means starting from one number in a record then applying a particular argument to every subsequent record. Lets say youre starting with 0210033 and want to number all the way to 0210099.

With the simple magic of computersand Microsoftthats a simple challenge a few clicks away from success. Microsoft Excel is imminently powerful enough to tackle mundane data manipulation such as this. In fact, its probably the greatest single reason why I continue to use Excel as my first step for inserting new data into my database.
Now that weve got the mundane made easier, we can continue to use Excels drag-and-drop capabilities to really speed data insertion of dozens of similar images. Insert the data from the first image then fill down or drag and drop the rest of the imagesfast indeed.

This kind of technology is an unbelievable time saver.

All this matters to my file-naming convention by how its easier to fill down numbers than it is with Alpha names such as my dog Spot by the river15 November 2002, version 2. So, to avoid the whole issue of making and managing highly descriptive names, I went with a totally numeric system that simply states what year the image was made and the number the digital camera had assigned.

Lets look at one of these numbers: File # 0217291. The first two numbers (02) note the year the image was made. The last four numbers (7291) were assigned by the digital camera. The third number (1) is a bit flexible. When I originally started this file management/naming scheme, it was simply combined with the last four numbers and represented the ten thousands digit. Note: Nikons cameras only assign numbers up to 9,999. After 9,999, it starts all over at 0001.