Consistant File Names

Lightroom reporting a different file name then the one on the memory card

If your like me or most professional photographers then you take a lot of pictures when shooting digital.

Being able to find photographs afterwards in your asset management system is important, and with modern meta data and database systems, the actual file name is becoming less important.

Sometimes though the file name is all you have to go on if your using more then one workflow.

With my desktop Lightroom catalogue, the new cloud based Lightroom CC on my laptop, iPhone and iPad, then keeping track of what I have imported and what I have not can get difficult.

At the weekend i’ll be shooting in the studio with several models and using several different cameras.  Afterwards my work flow will be fairly straight forward.

  1. Copy all the cards to the internal SSD of my Desktop Machine
    1. These then will get backed up by my automatic PC backup
  2. Import to Lightroom Classic
    1. This copies the files to my main external Thunderbolt Drive
    2. This also makes a backup copy to Dropbox
  3. Initial metadata and develop by preset
  4. Then sorting out selects and picks to do a final edit on

When I am shooting more informally then the work flow may be the above, but its more likely me just grabbing the card at the end of the day and then copying the files to Dropbox to sort another day.  Or using my iPad SD Card reader and pulling in the photographs to Lightroom Mobile, or even using the Leica Mobile iOS app to pull off the odd photography.

The problem with these other workflows is that sometimes the process, it the Leica App or the iOS operating system itself is changing the file names.  This then makes it difficult to keep track what photographs have been imported into my master library on the desktop machine and what are still to import.  If not careful you can either loose photographs or end up with duplicate shots in your library.

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