OneTouchPhotoDumpToJournal.sh is a trivial script I wrote that saves me much manipulation each time I come back to my workstation with removable media full of photos. It copies all images from a removable media to the directory of the day (created on the fly if not existing), autorotates them and sets the permissions right. It is what I use prior to putting the pictures in an appropriately named directory and running dir_date_serial_rename_all.sh to name them according to my standard.

Canon Eos digital cameras name their files “img_XXXX.jpg” where ‘XXXX’ is a number beween 0001 and 9999. Considering how many pictures we take, duplicate names come fast. In addition, that name is desperately lacking any meta-information that may help in making the file manageable.

So as part of my workflow I have defined a photo file naming scheme that includes the date, the time and the session that picture belongs to. What I define as a session is a group of pictures with a unity of time, place and/or action. I believe I have found a good choice of minimal meta-information to pack in the file name to make it both unique and useful to humans.

The datetime of acquisition is found in an EXIF tag embedded in the file. I deduce the session from the parent directory name because putting all pictures belonging to a single session into an approprietely named directory is what immediately follows my automated download and lossless rotation routine.

Because I am a very lazy person I have of course automated all that. So here is dir_date_serial_rename_all.sh – a small shell scripts that automates my habit of picture files renaming.

This script takes all files in the current directory and renames them using the following pattern :
current_directory_name.date.time.camera_serial.extension

For example :
"my current directory/img_6051.jpg" taken the 2nd of December 2005 at 9:07:59 AM (according to the embedded EXIF metadata)
becomes
my current directory/my_current_directory.20051202.090759.6051.jpg

Although I was quite happy with the nice pictures I brought back from South Africa last December, I very well knew how wide the gap remains between my little fiddlings and what seasoned virtuosos achieve. But today I took a look at Todd Gustafson’s take from Kenya in late September and it made me feel even smaller. These pictures are absolutely stunning : not just technically outstanding but also original and well chosen.

According to Bill on rec.travel.africa Todd Gustafson uses mostly a Canon EF 600/4 L IS with a Canon digital body and a Nikon 200-400/4 also on a digital body. There is also some fill flash with a Better Beamer flash extender. For the sake of both my wallet and my back I will not even dream about using the Canon EF 600/4 L IS…

But fill flash for pictures of animals is something I had not thought about and that I should have begun using long ago. Now that I have seen this picture of a backlit white faced monkey in a Costa Rica forest by Philip Greenspun I wonder if my own negatives of backlit chimpanzees from the Kibale forest are even worth scanning…