I have created a folder on the hard drive called PhotosTemp and when I take photos from my camera’s memory card I create a subfolder with the day’s date in the format yy-mm-dd. It is important to use this reverse date format because it makes the sorting straightforward. I then transfer all the images on the card to the subfolder.
The first action is to look at the images in FIV and discard any which are useless, out of focus, motion blur, the ones where someone has moved in front of the camera and so on, be ruthless they are using up storage space. The second action is to rename the images. The typical file names from cameras is DSCF1234 which is not very helpful. I have used a file naming format for many years which is shown below
yymmdd-a-ab-descriptionnnn.jpg
the date comes from the image file’s EXIF data and is the date the image was taken. EXIF data is written into the image file and gives such data as dates, camera type, shutter speed, aperture and with the latest cameras GPS location data. EXIF data can be viewed in FIV. a is a code letter for the camera type (I have several cameras), ab is a two letter code for the subject matter, for example, fo is family outing, wa watercolour potential and so on, description is self explanatory and nnn is a three digit sequence number, here is an example
160723-h-wa-ElingCreek005.jpg
If you adopt this system you may wish to simplify it to
yymmdd-descriptionnnn.jpg
Remember you can add comments to the file data. Once you have added jpeg comments to the images you can view them in FIV or using a program called ExifTool and its graphical user interface ExifToolGui. If you do use the latter be careful to read the instructions for setting it up that I have written and which are included in the zip file which can be downloaded using the link on the
useful software page. Here is an example of its output.