UHD:

 

I'm curious as to the seemingly common desire for file re-naming. What is the advantage/need of re-naming the files? Surely it is less work/management to have them automatically sorted into folders by your management software and use the software to find what you are after. I feel like good quality abstraction from the file names is a huge advantage over software that can re-name the file to keep some sort of filesystem 'order'.

 

For reference, I have some 220GiB of backed up images spanning just over a decade arranged into folders named YYYY-MM-DD. The files are all randomly named (whatever the various cameras decided they preferred) but since they all have EXIF data which includes the date and time they were taken management is not an issue at all and I can find anything I need in a couple of clicks.

 

Look ahead to 50 years, and would you be able to remember what year photos were taken ? Would your kids, or grand-kids ?

You have only 10 years of happy-snaps, I have 50, plus my parents 40 years, plus some even older.

So on what years did I go to Motuihe Island for a trip ?, rhetorically speaking ?.  I know I did twice in the 70's and 80's, probably in the summer ....- so that's 2 decades of images to look thru.

I like to add names, dates, possible location and other items of interest to the EXIF data, so hopefully a search would bring up the correct photos, and not be reliant on some external database that will go obsolete.

Some of the photos I have go back to the turn of the 20th century or more, and have barely decipherable  notes on the back. Not bad "meta" storage of 117+ years . No digital bit rot, only analog fade.

Granted, a photo back then was a luxury, and were rare events, not like the snap happy recent generations where it's digital from go to whoa. Even my generation had to curate photos as it cost real money to buy film and have it processed. On thick paper, even ...