Hello everyone and happy belated holidays. The year has started off beautifully here at Pilot Imaging and we are looking forward to a great 2010. We hope we can share it with you.
Now, onto our Lightroom tip. Get ready, because it’s a lot of information. Today we will be going over renaming. But Robert, you might say, I’ve spent all this time setting up a custom naming system on my camera and every shot I take gets numbered sequentially in the camera, why would I want to rename? Well, imagine if you will our previous Lightroom tip where we time-synced all of our cameras with multiple shooters. You can set Lightroom to show them all sequentially by setting your “sort” to Capture Time, but now what? If you export your images with the original file name, wherever you put them, outside of Lightroom, they will be seen in alphabetical order. That’s no good for anyone, unless your time-sync order is the same as your alphanumeric order. Luckily Lightroom makes renaming a breeze. Let’s assume you time-synced all your photos and sorted them to Capture Time. Make sure you are in the Library module and in Grid Mode. Select all your photos (Ctrl+a on a PC or Command+a on a Mac). In the menu bar, click “Library” and then “Rename Photos”. A new window pops up with a File naming option. Click the drop down menu and choose “Edit”. Here you are presented with a File Naming Template Editor and you can choose many different file naming options. Your template is in the white box and if there is any information in it, delete it by clicking in the box and hitting the delete key until everything is gone. Now you have a blank slate to work with. As you look at your options, you will see that there are many ways to set up your template. I usually like to have some kind of custom text, unique to each client and then a sequential number. To make this happen, I choose “Custom Text” and hit the insert button. You should see the words “custom text” appear in the white box. That means it worked. Next, in the white box, I would put an underscore to separate from your next item. Now I would choose “Sequence #(0001)” by clicking the drop down menu in the sequence box. Click insert. The reason I choose Sequence #(0001) is because when there are many files, between 1,000-10,000, choosing 0001 will keep all your files in the correct order. If you just chose “Sequence #(1)” file number 1, 2, 3, etc will be placed before 10, 20, 30, etc. If you don’t believe me, and it makes no sense, check out how binary works or just trust me. Now that you have your template set up, it’s time to save it and come up with some clever name for it. Click the drop down menu next to the words preset at the top of your File Template Editor window. Choose “Save Current Settings as New Preset”. Here is where your creative juices come into play. Name away. I came up with the name “Custom text_Sequence 4″…I’m good. Click ok and you’re done. Because you just created this new template, you will be presented with it in your renaming window. In the custom text box, write anything that is unique to your job and in the start number box, choose “1” or whatever number you would like the renumber to start. At the bottom left of that window, you will see an example of what your new renamed file will look like. If you’re happy with it, click ok and now you are really done. You now have all your photos renamed and in a time-synced order. Every application that can sort alphanumerically will see your event shot from many different cameras, in the correct order.
It’s now time for some shameless lab promotion. On Tuesday, January 26, Pilot Imaging is hosting a free Album Building Workshop. It’s great that all your images are now in order because it will make building that album so much easier. Good for you!!! As for the workshop, we will be showing photographers how to use LabPrints Album Building software to create beautiful, everlasting, life changing albums. We will also be joined by Stacy Evans from Capri Album Company and she will be showing us tons of samples and as well as answering any questions you may have. LabPrints Album building software is a perfect addition to your workflow and we will show you how.
That’s it for now FOPs. Have a great day and we hope to see you on the 26th. As always if you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to call, email, skype or just drop by. We are always here to help. In the eternal words of Vidal Sasson, if you don’t look good, we don’t look good. Lots of love, your friends at Pilot Imaging.
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