Name Your Image Files to Avoid Catastrophe

it's not a sexy topic i know but today i'm going to show you how to name and organize your image files like a boss hey everyone i'm kevin patrick-robbins people just call me kpr you can too and this is studio builder where i make videos to help professional photographers and aspiring professional photographers improve aspects of their business in this video i'm going to talk about how to name your image files in a specific way and why you should do this and at the end of the video i'll tell you the one place where you absolutely should completely ignore absolutely everything i'm about to say in this video [Applause] the first thing you should do is change the image prefix in your camera i know not all cameras can do this not all makes and models allow you to do this but if your camera does start there on my canon r6 this one i'm recording on and most canon cameras the default image prefix is img underscore in my settings i've changed my image prefix to kpr underscore images that get saved to my card are all named kpr underscore followed by a sequential number such as kpr underscore one two three four one two three five one two three six so on and so forth why would you wanna do this i think for a couple of reasons if you're photographing a wedding with an assistant or second shooter using an identical camera and file naming structure this will allow you to differentiate between who captured which image i know a lot of wedding photographers who really want their second shooters to shoot with the same make of camera as they do they want this because they know and understand that the the color science from the images is going to be very similar and it's not a bad thing it's just that you want to maintain consistency across the entire range of images that you're shooting at a wedding secondly if your camera is stolen this makes it easier to prove the camera is yours if the person who stole it does not reset the camera to factory defaults and starts posting images with your prefix as the file name it'll make it easier to find them and report them what are the odds that someone who stole your camera equipment has the exact same initials that you do pretty slim here's the simple formula to how i rename my image files on import and how i think you should too date plus time plus job name that's it it's that simple the date consists of four numbers for the year two numbers for the month with leading zeros for january through september and two numbers for the date with a leading zero for the first through the ninth of the month the time consists of two numbers for the hour using a 24 hour clock two numbers for the minutes two numbers for the seconds with leading zeros obviously four minutes and seconds having the date and time as a leading piece of information right at the front of your file name has multiple benefits without opening the file you can see exactly when the image was captured in windows explorer mac os finder your files are sorted by default by their file names when that happens your images are then also sorted in chronological order now my favorite aspect of naming files this way is that it gets rid of the camera's default numerical sequencing this is great for when you have clients emailing you asking why there are proofs for images named two three four five and two three four seven and then they're like oh where's image two three four six instead what they get are proofs that are still ordered chronologically but they just don't know if you've removed an out-of-focus shot or an image that you didn't like and wouldn't want to put your name on and put it out into the world finally i include a couple words that describe the job name so if it was an editorial shoot for let's say toronto life magazine i would add editorial toronto life assignment name or editorial toronto life subject name this also allows you to quickly search your computer for a specific job when you need to find it but don't remember when you shot it the file names for images on your computer should look like this date hyphen time hyphen short job name description period extension now when i export my images i make one small change to the file i add the words photo by kevin patrick robbins to the end of the file name and it's not for copyright because that information is going to be stored in the metadata and i know that that can be stripped out when it goes onto social media but this is simply for the client let's say you have a client that is a large organization or business your images might stay within their asset bank or their digital assets might just be in a folder on the computer of the communications director or more likely the communications coordinator people change jobs and move companies pretty frequently nowadays especially people lower on the corporate ladder if the person who hired me forgets who they hired two years ago or someone new comes along in that position they can just look at the file name of an image see my name right there and then look me up on google find my website and reach out to me hire me again a small don't count on it kind of side bonus is that your clients might actually even post your images directly to their website as you send them i have actually been hired by a client who saw my photos on their competitors website saw the final names of those photos looked me up and hired me so simply adding that little photo by credit at the end of the file name has actually gotten me work i've seen many of my friends and colleagues searching for images on their hard drives and organizing their images in a way that often has zero organizational structure and doesn't even make sense to them when you organize your files on your computer the best way to do this is with nested folders ordered chronologically create folders for each year such as 2021 22 23 24 25 and so on within each year create folders for each month using the numbers the same way you did for your file names for 2023 you would have folders named 2023-01-02-03 and so on and so forth if you wanted you could add the name of the month at the end of that but the key is to lead with the numbers so that sorting by file name or folder name also keeps everything sorted chronologically in folders for the month i will then have a separate folder for each session i have done each session will be named with the year month date and again like the file name a little bit of information about the session now i do this in capture one and capture one will create that folder automatically but i just stick to that same naming pattern that i did with the file names so my recommendation is to take some time to organize your files go through each session batch rename your images if you have to get your computer cleaned up and organized you will thank me later in fact thank me in the comments leave a comment um if you have questions let me know i'm happy to answer them okay so now that you've done all that here's the place where you don't want to follow these guidelines you want to do that all of that on your computer absolutely but where you do not want to do that is when you're putting images on your website when you're naming images for your website you want to make sure that you are using seo best practices you probably know that seo stands for search engine optimization that's a series of practices that you can put to use to better help search engines understand what your website is about and actually help you rank higher in search engine results images on your website should have names that are unique to each and every single page upon which they are placed on your website this helps better serve the search ability and rank of every single page on your website and your website as a whole this is often the most overlooked part of seo for photographers just changing the image names of your file if you haven't already done this will give your website a significant boost in rankings now i covered all of this and more in detail in another video on search engine optimization which you can watch right now and i will also link to it in the description of this video thanks for watching [Music] [Applause] you