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I have just received my very first Daily Deviation over at deviantART! The image which received this award is First light.
Put in simple terms, the Daily Deviation is a daily feature chosen each day by a staff who wish to showcase an image which they found impressive or otherwise interesting enough to deserve being brought to the attention of the community-at-large.
Without a doubt, I’m definitely ecstatic about it! And considering that I have been on dA for only 1 month, I consider myself to be very lucky! All thanks to my friends and watchers over at deviantART for their unyielding support and encouragement!
After registering an account on deviantART back in 2008, I did not realise that I have been inactive for so long! Until last week, when I was somehow feeling down and was looking for an outlet.
I finally uploaded some works last week and all I can say that the community over there is great. I must say that it’s a good environment to get your art up there and witness the response from the users. You can even get some good critique on your work if you’re up to it. Regardless of whether you’re a beginner, an amateur or professional, I would say it’s a level playing field over there.
My deviantART: gnohz.deviantart.com
This post is a follow up to the previous article which addressed issues photographers face during renaming and storing their photographs in an effective and failproof way.
After figuring out how you should name your images, the storage part should be easy and straightforward. For instance, if your file naming convention goes something like TP1110WZ00001.NEF where “1110″ refers to “Year 2011″ and “Month of October”, you could consider sorting your images in folders according to “Month”. For eg, TP1101, TP1102, TP1103 etc.
If you decide to name your files using only the “Year” as in TP2011WZ001.NEF, sorting in folders according to “Year” is another option.
To make locating images even more efficient, you could also consider adding some descriptive text to the folder names so that you can easily identify the content of each folder.
One of the most common issues among photographers is the topic of how to name and store their images effectively. The main point here is to rename the images in a way such that:
1. All images will have a unique identification so as to eliminate any problems that may arise due to overlapping of filenames.
2. The naming system should cater to the volume of images the photographer takes comfortably without running out of names.
Consider the following file naming convention I use for my own images:
TP<YEAR><MONTH>WZ<SEQUENTIAL NUMBER>.NEF
Let me explain briefly how it works.
- TP: Abbreviation of Truphotos.
- <YEAR>: Expressed by the last 2 digits of the year when the image was taken. In this case, “11″ is take from “2011″.
- <MONTH>: Expressed in 2 digits when the image was taken. For eg, January will read “01″ and June will read “06″.
- “WZ”: This alphabets were used to make it easier to differentiate the numerals meant for the <YEAR><MONTH> and meant for the <SEQUENTIAL NUMBER>. In other words, ease of identification when searching for an image.
- <SEQUENTIAL NUMBER>: Expressed as a 5-digit running number such as “00001″ or “02324″. This depends on the total volume of images you produce in a month based on reasonable estimation. If you think your number will definitely not exceed “9999″ images a month, then you are fine with using only 4 digits.
With this filenaming convention, you can easily see that every single image will have a unique filename and it will not overlap no matter what, unless I go over the limit by shooting my 100,000th image of course. That is why determining the <SEQUENTIAL NUMBER> for yourself is so important.
Following the above guidelines, you can customise it in many ways to suit your style. For eg, you could have something like “2011XX0001.NEF” if you prefer to sort only by the year, and definitely sure that your images taken in any year is less than 10,000.
For photographers who submit to microstock sites and prefer to separate personal images from microstock images, you could consider having 2 systems with different abbreviations at the beginning, such as TP1110WZ00001.NEF (TP for Truphotos) and MS1110WZ001.NEF (MS for Microstock).
