GEOG 4193 – Individual Studies in Geography (STEP Field Work Pre-Travel Experience)

Are you taking photos or videos as part of your project? Keep track of them as you go with consistent file names and folders. Locations and dates are good ways to keep track. 

Did you know that there is a lot of information contained in the image file itself? In the metadata.  Use this info to your advantage https://www.snopes.com/crime/warnings/smartphonepix.asp .

Overview for photographers by photographers: http://photometadata.org/

Technical details about the metadata: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Exif

Making your file names descriptive and standardized will make them easy to understand later and more useful to others. Choose a file naming convention, detail it in a readme.txt file, and stick with it.Consider including:

• Project name or acronym
• Location or spatial coordinates
• Researcher name or initials
• Date or data range
• Type of data (what did you measure?)
• Version number
• Make sure your file names have the three-letter extension on them for application-specific files

Tips and tricks:

• For dates, use YYYYMMDD
• Try to keep file names short, since long file names do not work well with all software
• Don’t use special characters, like ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) ` ; ? , [ ] { } ‘ “
• Use leading zeros and your files will sort in sequential order; 001, 002, 003, …010, 011, 013, …100, 101, 102 
• Don’t use spaces; instead use underscores, dashes, no separation at all, or CamelCase (no spaces, but every new word is capitalized)