The camera manufacturers can't know how you want to organize things. The probably sat down and found a realistic number at which they thought everyone would be happy with for a counter. I myself have shot 3k+ photos for an assignment so I feel comfortable with a 10k photo limit.
Yeah, I misunderstood you about the folders... . But I don't see a benefit to a 100k digit counter vs. 10k. But, that's just me. There may be others like you that want more. I don't know what else the camera manufacturers can do, though, besides an alphanumeric folding naming capability which for in camera work really isn't necessary. That's file management and that's not a camera's job. Maybe they could go from a decimal naming convention (I think) to a hexadecimal naming system? :) That'd be fun to figure out The time stamp is pretty worthless. You have to find the software to rename them according to creation date in the EXIF data. Your workflow sounds just like everyone else's. I've not used the Downloader Pro program as I've always thought that having a program to copy images off a flash card onto your hard drive is a waste of money. But, plenty of people like it. I opted for PhotoMechanic which is a viewer as well as it allows you to easiy see EXIF data and edit all the IPTC fields for captions and stuff like that. It also has an option called "Injest Disks" which allows you to copy files from flash card to hard drive and at the same time rename them, add IPTC info for batch captioning, and other stuff. I haven't used it but I might try it one of the days. But, while I haven't run into your exact problem with duplicate file names, I do similar things when I update my online galleries like my SportShooter & One Model Place galleries. When I do that I always wind up with a bunch of files with meaningless names. So when I'm putting files from different events into one consolidated directory for some reason I always prepend the files with a better descriptor. Not for fear of having duplicates but so I can find a particular photo easier inside that consolidated directory. Mike From: Ken Lin They could have helped to make this less of a problem, than again they could have only supplied a 3-digit counter, just imagine being told by your favourite camera manufacturer "It's not our problem, it's yours!" A bit presumptuous, Big Mike, aren't we? When I said I don't care for folders I was referring to the in-camera folders and that I'd rather have 5 or even 6-digit counters and give up the in-camera folders. I do organize my bills and financial papers into folders, and I DO organize the images into distinctly named folders too based on each event I shoot, each event gets their own folder and since I have not (yet) shot more than 9,999 images per event, rolling over and have identical file numbers for different images in one event is not a problem (yet) :-) The problem occurs when I pull different images out of different folders to put them into one folder, say for a slide show of multiple airshows or car races within one year, and two or more of the files happen to have the same file names! This has only happened a few times, it's not anything that couldn't be taken care of by just temporarily renaming one of the file with a prefix or postfix, but it would have been much easier had there been a way straight from the camera to reasonably minimize this possibility. As well, even if the selection of images I picked out all had distinct file names, they may be from different cycles of 1-9,999, so they can be out of chronological order when I organize them by their file names, which I suppose I can organize them by their time stamp IF I hadn't modified them at some point which just rendered their time stamp completely meaningless. The Downloader Pro suggested by Malcolm and Craig looks interesting, so is the DIM mentioned by Lee, or renaming the files by adding a prefix as suggested by Dieter, it's the thought of having to go through an extra step or an extra layer of interface that drives me bunkers. Right now I take the CF card out of the camera, stick it into the laptop, copy the files off the folder into "my pictures" directory, rename the folder to the event and I'm done, doing anything extra to rename the file is fine for people who wanted more of a descriptive file name, but I guess there is no easy way around it with the camera I have right now. Otherwise I love the 1D Mk 2 ! Ken * **** ******* *********************************************************** * For list instructions, including unsubscribe, see: * http://www.a1.nl/phomepag/markerink/eos_list.htm ***********************************************************
