Changing the IMG prefix on Canon 5D

Joined: 16 Feb 2006 Posts: 3

I could not find where this was asked before, so I apologize in advance if it was.

We regularly shoot events and weddings with multiple cameras (sometimes up to 5 cameras at once). This presents a problem when it comes to combining all of the images as the same filename will become repeated. What I'd like to do is dump all of the cards into the same folder, sort by date created, and batch rename. We run into problems though where maybe camera 2 and camera 5 both time IMG_9062.

Now I know that when you shoot in sRGB it is IMG and when in Adobe RGB it is _MG. Is there any way to set this per camera, I.E. CA1_#### for camera 1, CA2_#### for camera 2. This would really help to avoid the problem of overlapping image numbers on multiple cameras.

This issue becomes even more intense when we do larger scale events where each camera shoots over 9999 pictures. Obviously at that point the files need to be seperated into a tiered structure anyways, but at least being able to have each camera with a unique prefix would really help.

i'd be interested to hear any solutions you guys could offer when working with groups of cameras shooting as a team.

Posted: Fri Aug 24, 2007 10:21 am

Here is how I handle this situation... Lightroom. With Lightroom I can dump my images to seperate folders but when I import them into Lightroom library I keyword them all with at least one common keyword that is not used on any other images already in my library. This way once all the images are imported i can select this keyword and all the images come up in the library regardless of what folder they are in. I can now have it sort by capture time and rename them all sequentially so they are all in chronological order.

I usually go through them all and hit 'X' on all the obvious rejects and turn on my filter flags so the tool will only dispay picked or unflagged images and not images flagged as rejected. Then I do the rename. This way I do not include my rejections in my renamed images... which are the ones I export from.