[fastcat]

I have just returned from a trip and realized: 1. that I made a stupid mistake and 2. that my 20D compounded the problem. I will be transfering the images from Flash Trax to computer via DP 1.7.

When I changed the time to the new time zone, I must have also inadvertantly advanced the month by one month. The result is that the exif for several thousand images taken in February and March read March and April, respectively. Is there a way to index to the correct date in DP? The problem would not be so bad if February were not a short month!

The other problem is that the camera exceeded 9999 clicks during the trip, which resulted in resetting the image numbering to 0001. I was using four 1GB cards and each time I changed the card the numbering reverted to 0001 or sometimes starting back in the 9900's. As a result, I have many images with the same image numbers (as well as the wrong date). I have never encountered a numbering problem before now. I always erase the cards by reformatting them in the camera and I verified that the numbering option in the camera is set to "Continuous". Is there a way to renumber the images in DP using date and time as an index?

Thanks for any help you can give me.

John

[DavidB]

The exif for several thousand images taken in February and March read March and April, respectively. Is there a way to index to the correct date in DP?

Chris may correct me, but I don't think that there is a way to solve your problem fully in DL Pro. The issue is, as you say that the EXIF data in the images is wrong, and DL Pro reads EXIF data, but does not write it.

The good news is that you can fix your problem with BreezeBrowser Pro. If you don't have BB Pro, I suggest that it is well worth the relatively modest cost of the licence for someone who manages a large number of images (I'm just a satisfied customer, and have no connection with the management ...).

The key first step is to download without creating duplicate file names. I would use DL Pro to create dated download folders, and I would also use names based on the folder number as well as the image number (file naming tokens %q and%r respectively). Images will then be named in the right order in all folders except the one where the image number 'flipped'; if that is a problem (which it probably will not be at this stage), you will have to do some renaming in that folder.

As a precaution, don't delete the images from the card until you have completed your manipulation in BB Pro.


Is there a way to renumber the images in DP using date and time as an index?

This is where BB Pro comes to the rescue. There are two steps.

Step 1 is to use the date/time adjustment facility in BB Pro to correct your EXIF date/time data (and, I suggest, the file date and time stamps as well). Essentially, this facility allows you to set the date and time forward or back by a specified amount; if, as I think is your situation, all the images in a given folder are 'off' by the same length of time, then you can change all the images in each folder as a batch. The dialogue also remembers the amount of adjustment applied, so it is quite easy to apply the same adjustment to images in a number of folders.

Step 2 is then to use the batch file rename facility in BBPro (with tokens) to rename the files by date and time. If you just use time-based file names, the time component will need to include seconds as well as minutes and hours, and even this will not eliminate the possibility of duplicate file names, as your 20D is capable of shooting more than one frame in the same second. I use a hybrid file naming scheme of the form , so a typical file name will be 20060309_5D_110-3471. No duplicates there, and plenty in the name to tell me the story of the image.

Thes things are very well explained in the BB Pro help files. I hope it all works for you.

[DavidB]

Since posting the above, I have realised that there may be a better way of avoiding duplicate file names on download. That is to create a separate download folder, and change the DL Pro download folder correspondingly, for each card in turn. The reason for this, of course, is that you know that there are no duplicate file names on any given card. But I would still use folder numbers as well as image numbers to name the files, as that gives a better chance that they will download into a sensible file order.

Also, on reflection, a better final naming scheme for you might be , say 20060309_190358_325-0013.

Once you have completed the renaming work in BB Pro, you can move the image files to where they belong in your folder tree.

Hope this helps

[fastcat]

Thanks for your suggestions, David.

I discovered after my initial post that there is a newer version of DL Pro that includes a series of "Uniqueness" tokens, which appears to provide a solution to my duplicate image number problem.

I will look at BB Pro for addressing the date problem.

John

[DavidB]

I confess that I had forgotten about the 'uniqueness' tokens. It is worth noting that they come with a few significant health warnings on the help page that lists all the tokens.

With four cards to download, I don't think, on my reading of the help page, that you could get all the images into a single order using the uniqueness tokens alone. However, if I understand your original post correctly, all your images are wrong by one calendar month. That ought to mean that they all have different dates/times (apart from the possible, but no doubt infrequent, case where you have taken two or more shots during the same second), and that they can be arranged in order of shooting.

If you prefer to go straight to time/date filenames (because of the image number confusion), I reckon that %d_%t_%L might be the way to go. This would give the wrong dates, of course, but it would produce unique names in shooting order. You can always download half a dozen files to test the concept, and delete them from the hard drive if you need to make further changes.

Another thought: use Windows Explorer or whatever to backup the images from the cards to somewhere safe before you start working. If you really screw up (and I speak from experience!), you can at least make another copy of the backup and point DL Pro at that to start again ...

[fastcat]

I did use several cards on the same day that the numbering turned over, resulting in at least three sets of duplicate RAW+JPEG image numbers on the same day. I hope DP will recognize them as separate images by their time stamps. Since, all of the images were dowloaded to a Flash Trax in the field, I am not dealing with multiple cards at this time. The FT is my de facto backup until I erase it.

My current thinking goes like this:
1. Download all images to a temporary folder using %E to separate the RAW & jpeg files and using %f_%r7_%l to number each image.
2. Revise the dates by subtracting 28 days in BB Pro.
3. Use DP to transfer the images to permanent Year_month folders (%Y_%m) and to add the day to the begining of each image number (%D).

A sanity check of this approach would be most welcomed! Thanks.

[DavidB]

I've never used a Flash Trax or similar device, and so I have asssume that, to DL Pro, it just looks like a very big card, provided that the folder structure and naming conforms to the standard conventions. I'm guessing, but it sounds as though you have tested this and are comfortable that it works in that way.

I've never encountered the issue of duplicate file names on a single 'card', but I guess that DLPro desn't have a problem, as it has to know and deal with the whole file path of each image. What worries DL Pro, as I understand it, is a clash of download file names. Chris will, I am sure, correct me if I have got this wrong.

I'm also assuming from what you say, is that you want to end up with a top level split between RAW and JPEG images, with each category divided up into its year/month folders.

All of that said, here goes with the sanity check.

I've looked at step 1, and, like you, I think it works. DL Pro will complain soon enough if it doesn't.

Step 2 only works if (a) the camera was mis-set on one occasion only and (b) that mis-setting was from February into March, i.e by 28 days. If not, and some of the files require a different date correction from others, I would do the initial download into date-named folders rather than make the RAW/JPEG split from the outset. (BB Pro has a useful facility for sorting files by type, so it is relatively easy to separate RAW from JPEG further downstream in the workflow). By definition, all files with a common (wrong) date will require the same time-shift.

However step 2 works in practice, this is one occasion when it makes every sense to tick the 'update file time stamp' box. Personally, I always tick the box.

I've never used DL Pro to move files on my hard drive, though I have seen posts in which, I think, Chris describes that approach. I use BB Pro for the image management tasks once files have been downloaded, so that is the way I would do your step 3.

I take what you say about the File Trax functioning as a backup. My own preference, from bitter experience, is that when one is doing something complicated with valuable data, life is a lot less fraught if there is a backup which is completely offline from the working process.

[Chris Breeze]

I did use several cards on the same day that the numbering turned over, resulting in at least three sets of duplicate RAW+JPEG image numbers on the same day. I hope DP will recognize them as separate images by their time stamps. Since, all of the images were dowloaded to a Flash Trax in the field, I am not dealing with multiple cards at this time. The FT is my de facto backup until I erase it.

My current thinking goes like this:
1. Download all images to a temporary folder using %E to separate the RAW & jpeg files and using %f_%r7_%l to number each image.
2. Revise the dates by subtracting 28 days in BB Pro.
3. Use DP to transfer the images to permanent Year_month folders (%Y_%m) and to add the day to the begining of each image number (%D).

A sanity check of this approach would be most welcomed! Thanks.

DLPro won't have any problem with source images having the same filenames provided you don't try to download them all into the same folder using the original filenames. I recommend the following:

1) Take a complete copy of the contents of your FlashTrax so that you've got a backup
2) Download all the images from the FlashTrax to a single folder using the filename %d%t_%o to avoid problems with duplicate filenames
3) Use BBPro to adjust the date in the images
4) Use DLPro to "download" the images from the single folder on your hard disk and sort them into date based folders and rename as required

Don't delete anything from the FlashTrax until you're sure that all the files have been downloaded successfully.