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Photo Tips

Organising photographs

Digital photographs contain "EXIF" information (metadata) from the camera about the photograph that makes organising photographs from a trip much easier. The date and time, and Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates are the most valuable. Ensure any camera you purchase has GPS, always enable GPS on your phone camera app.

To gain full use of these tips ensure that all cameras on a trip are set to the same date and time.

• especially after daylight saving time changes
• when travelling overseas update the date and time to local time for every timezone

After the trip upload all your photographs from the camera to your computer.

Renaming photograph to include date and time in the filename

Renaming photographs to prefix the filename with date and time assists with

• chronologically arranging the photographs from different cameras using filename
• avoids overwriting photographs when there are two photographs with the same name (many cameras use similar file naming schemes)

Rename all photographs to include in the file name the

• date and time the photo was taken (use the format "yyyy-mm-dd hh.mm.ss"), ideally as the file name prefix
• the name of the photographer
• suffix the name with the place or description

The best way to rename photographs on Windows is to use the free "Renamer".

Renamer uses a set of rules to rename the photograph using the internal EXIF information, and information you add to the rules.
Download suggested rules for use in Renamer. These rules do the following

• prefix the file name with the date and time of the photograph obtained from the information from the camera in the photograph
• suffix "Your Name" to the photograph
• change the file extension to ".jpeg" (you can disable this rule)
• tidy up and remove superfluous spaces in the file name

The original file name is preserved.

After installing Renamer run it to ensure the following settings are made:

"Enable meta tag support"

"Enable Add to ..."

Then it is easy to right mouse click on the folder of photographs and select the "Add to Renamer" option.

Folder naming

A good convention for folder naming is "yyyy-mm-dd Place or event name", eg "2011-01-22 Megamania caving"

Panoramas

If your camera has a panorama mode use it to take a series of panoramic photos. If not try to ensure that exposure settings are as similar as is possible for each exposure. When taking photos ensure that each overlaps by ½ to ⅓ on each edge you wish to join. To join or stitch photos together there are a number of commercial products, some of which may be supplied with a camera, and the following free software:

• Microsoft Image Composite Editor (recommended)
• Hugin - Panorama photo stitcher

or online

• CleVR online stitch photos

Adjusting photograph EXIF date and time

If the camera time was wrong, for example no date and time was set, in a different time zone, or the time was not updated for daylight saving, there is a free for personal use program that can help fix this - FastStone Image Viewer. Note: always make a copy of all your photographs before doing this.

Use the Change Timestamp option under Tools

Rotating photographs

Most cameras place the camera orientation when the photograph was taken in the EXIF information, eg Portrait or Landscape. You can use the FastStone Image Viewer to losslessly rotate all portrait images (recommended). Simply open a folder in FastStone Image Viewer, select all images (ctrl-a) then use the JPEG Lossless Rotate under Tools to Auto-Rotate based on EXIF Orientation Tag.

Playing Movies

New cameras use AVCHD (Advanced Video Coding High Definition) format for recording movies. These are easy to play using VLC media player which is available for many platforms (recommended).

Adrian and Jim at the bottom of Powderkeg

Photo: Simon