The Canon EOS Digital Rebel XS/1000D Companion

Organizing Your Images

No matter which method you use to transfer images to your computer, if you're managing your image organization yourself (as opposed to having a program like iPhoto, Aperture, or Lightroom do it for you), then you will want to think about how to organize your files.

You'll be best-served in your organizational chores by making good use of folders. How to organize these folders is entirely a matter of personal preference—just find a scheme that makes sense to you. You can create folders by subject—"Arizona vacation," "Winter holidays," "Family reunion"—or by date. You'll probably find that some combination of both works best, especially if you find yourself shooting a lot of similar events.

As you accumulate more vacation folders, you can group these together into other folders. With well-named folders, you can easily rearrange your taxonomy later, creating new branches of your naming "tree" and then rearranging photos as needed.

What you probably won't need to do is rename files. Yes, the images that come out of your camera have pretty meaningless names, but with a browser program such as the one that came with your camera, or programs such as Adobe Bridge or Camera Bits Photo Mechanic, you can search and sort your images by viewing thumbnails, rather than by digging through lists of arcane filenames.

If you do feel compelled to rename your images, renaming by hand is probably not the way to go, unless you're talking about only a handful of images. Programs like Bridge, Photo Mechanic, and most image browsers provide tools for automatically renaming batches of files. If you think you need to have your individual image files named, then consider using such a utility.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: FILE NUMBERING OPTIONS

As you may have already noticed, image files that come out of the Rebel XS have meaningless names. The XS usually labels its images IMG_ and then a sequential number and a file extension, either JPG or CR2.

By default, every time you start shooting, the camera picks up with the next number in the series, even if you change media cards.

If you'd rather, you can configure the camera so that it starts with new numbers every time you change the card. With this scheme, though, you have to be careful when transferring new images into a folder that contains previously transferred images, because many images will have the same name.

So, if you think you'll always be putting new images in their own folders, then having the numbers reset might be a good choice, because each folder will have its own numbering scheme that starts at 1. If you want to be able to throw new images into existing folders that already have images, then you'll probably want to stick with continuous numbering so that you don't have to worry about new files overwriting old.

To change the file numbering preference, go to the tools menu 1, and choose File numbering. You'll find three options, Continuous, which is the default behavior; Auto reset, which resets the numbers every time you change cards; and Manual reset, which creates a new folder on the camera's media card and resets the file numbering scheme.

Manual reset can be a handy way to keep images organized into different folders on the camera's media card. For instance, each morning of a trip, you can reset to create a new folder. Or, every time you change locations you could reset to create a new folder. When you get home, you'll have separate folders with specific images in them. Copy these to your hard drive, and your images will already be sorted into an appropriate folder structure. Once you've identified the subject or date of each folder, you can rename that folder accordingly.