Rename file with code replacement during ingest?

[Tony Fiorda]

I am bidding job where I would be photographing 1000 employees and the company wants the filenames to have the lastnamefirstinitial (fiordat) as the filename with the date taken.  No problem with the date variables, but I really don't want to have to touch each file to rename them.

Is there a way, during ingest, to use a code replacement, or something similar, such as:

 usr1[tab]fiordat
 usr2[tab]smithj
 usr3[tab]popet

in the file renaming section of the ingest dialog?  Will PM cycle through the replacement file if the original code is just usr1 or do they each have to be unique?  Or is there another way to do this with PM?  I was planning on having an assistant create a file with the code replacements during the shoots.

Tony...

[Kirk Baker]

Tony,

I am bidding job where I would be photographing 1000 employees and the company wants the filenames to have the lastnamefirstinitial (fiordat) as the filename with the date taken.  No problem with the date variables, but I really don't want to have to touch each file to rename them.

Is there a way, during ingest, to use a code replacement, or something similar, such as:

 usr1[tab]fiordat
 usr2[tab]smithj
 usr3[tab]popet

in the file renaming section of the ingest dialog?  Will PM cycle through the replacement file if the original code is just usr1 or do they each have to be unique?  Or is there another way to do this with PM?  I was planning on having an assistant create a file with the code replacements during the shoots.

You're wanting to identify the photographer or the person in the photo?  If it's the photographer, you could record the serial numbers of the camera each photographer is using and use that value as the code and then the replacement would be the photographer name (in the format you described).  Then you would just use the serial number variable (serial} to look up the code replacement like so:

={serial}= {datesort}

(My delimiter is '=', yours may be different)

Put the above example in the Renaming section of the Ingest dialog and you should be good to go.  If you don't know what your camera's serial numbers are, you can use the {serial} variable in your Info Text and shoot one picture from each body, and preview them in PM.  Your serial numbers will appear in the Info Text panel in the Preview window.

HTH,

-Kirk

[Tony Fiorda]

Hi Kirk and thanks for the quick reply.  I can see how that works for the photographer.  Sorry I didn't make myself clear, but they want to identify the person in the photo in the filename.  With so many employees, they don't want to open each file to see who it is.  And I don't want us doing something similar!  :-) 

So that's 1000 employees that they want the filename to look something like 110426-smithj.jpg (110426-{lastnamefirstinital}.jpg). 


Tony...

[Kirk Baker]

Tony,

Hi Kirk and thanks for the quick reply.  I can see how that works for the photographer.  Sorry I didn't make myself clear, but they want to identify the person in the photo in the filename.  With so many employees, they don't want to open each file to see who it is.  And I don't want us doing something similar!  :-) 

So that's 1000 employees that they want the filename to look something like 110426-smithj.jpg (110426-{lastnamefirstinital}.jpg). 

While Code Replacement can work miracles, unless something is unique in each photo that could be used to look up a mapping then Code Replacement isn't going to be able to help.  Even facial recognition software wouldn't be able to help unless you had already trained it with images of each employee.

Sorry.

-Kirk

[Tony Fiorda]

Hey Kirk,

I came to that same conclusion.  It was worth a try though, thanks.  It looks like I might need to get my scripting chops updated to create a script that opens and reads the employee name file in to a stack, takes the first item in that stack, rename an image file using that item and then cycles to the next item in the stack and next image file until done.  It has been too many years since I've done any programming though I will find a way!

BTW, that might make a great feature addition to future versions of PM.

Thanks again and take care,

Tony...