Saturday, 5 March 2022

How to decode my filenames

 Juan Mari Alberdi Garitaonandia at YouTube asked how to decode the strange filenames that I use, and what lens(es) or addons I use with my Sony A7sii camera.

I have a spreadsheet in which I have a numbered list of titles. These are the names I use for the Flickr Albums where I put images at Flickr. 

Almost but not quite all the images I put up at Flickr go into Flickr albums. The few exceptions are for one-off use where I don't care whether I can ever find the image again.

That spreadsheet is in the order I upload my Flickr albums. I have another spreadsheet which shows where each album sits in terms of Flickr Collections.


Here is a screenshot of the top level of my Flickr Collections, from which you can drill down to individual Flickr Albums.


Here is a screenshot of one of my Flickr Albums.


The title of the Flickr Album includes this:

A7sii+2x2+100+YNBFPS Garden 27 February 2022

which can interpreted as follows:

A7sii - the camera I used, A Sony A7sii full frame camera

+2x2 - with a two teleconverters, each of power 2X

+100 - with a 100mm Laowa 2X macro lens

+YNBFPS:

YN - A Yongnuo 24EX twin flash

B - firing backwards into a 12" plastic bowl

F - the bowl is lined with aluminium foil

P - the aluminium foil has a layer of printer paper on top of it

S - the light, reflected from inside the bowl, is diffused with a single layer of artificial silk as it leaves the bowl.

Garden - the garden at our house

27 February 2022 - the date when the images were captured.

I am not consistent about how I construct my album names. Also, my setups change quite often, so the abbreviations I use change too. I do not have a list of all the abbreviations I have used, so even I have difficulty sometimes working out exactly what setup I used for a particular album, especially if it was some years ago. 

As it happens there are illustrations of the setup I used for that capture in this Flickr Album, so that answers the question about what lens(es) and addons I used for this image. I can't give a general answer to the question because it changes from time to time. And I use an entirely different setup, and different techniques, for flowers and other botanical subjects. There is information about various setups I have used over the past decade and more in this separate blog. Earlier entries in this blog (the one you are reading now) has more information about my more recent setups.

Here is a screenshot of an image from that Flickr Album, as it appears at Flickr.


Here is how to interpret the filename of the image, which is:

2022 04 2022_02_27 DSC02916_PLab5 1300h DNAIcLoHi

2022 - the identifier for the Flickr Album as listed in the first spreadsheet above

04 - the sequence number of this image within the Flickr Album

2022_02_27 - the date on which the image was captured

DSC02916 - the filename of raw file for the image

_PLab5 - the raw file was processed in DXO PhotoLab, to produce a TIFF file

1300h - The TIFF file was edited in Lightroom Classic and was the output as a 1300 pixel high TIFF file.

DNAIcLoHi: 

DNAI - the 1300 pixel high TIFF file had output sharpening and noise reduction applied in Topaz DeNoise AI, 

c - using the Clear method 

Lo -with noise parameter set to Low 

Hi - and sharpening parameter set to High.

As with album naming, I am not consistent in how I name images, and depending on what I do, such as using an additional editor, extra items may appear in the filename.