All Day I Dream About Photography

Introduction

Most of Canon EOS DSLR will not let you easily know the number of your camera’s shutter actuationsonly a visit to canon’s service center can reveal the actual number, for this reason most of these DSLR owners will rely on the camera’s file numbering to track the number of shots taken with their camera.

However this method has it pitfalls, Canon EOS batch file renamer is a small visual basic script I have wrote for my own use to help overcome one of the continuous file numbering problems and is designed to work with Canon EOS DSLR cameras.

The Problems

Even if we assume that you have set your digital camera to continuous from day 1, there is still some precautions to be taken to be able to accurately track you shutter actuation number like

CF cards used on other digital cameras

Whenever you insert a CF card in you Canon EOS digital camera set with continuous file numbering, the camera will pick the highest of the numbers between your camera’s memory and the one on the CF to continue from.
e.g.: If your camera remembers that the last file number it wrote was 2400 and you plug a CF card on which the highest file number was 4000 your camera will number the next image as 4001.
To overcome this problem you should always remember to format the CF card on your computer before inserting it in you digital camera. So all it takes is to insert a CF and turn your EOS DSLR on to mess everything.

The new “Manual Reset” feature

Newer Canon EOS digital cameras like the Canon EOS 5D/30D/400D will give you the option to create a new folder on the CF and reset the file counter to 0 every time you manual reset it. This is useful if you are shooting more than one event on the same CF card.
e.g.: In the morning you are shooting your kids playing then, before downloading the pictures to you computer, you go shooting sports in the afternoon. It is very practical at this stage to simply manual reset the camera so that those 2 shooting event have each its own folder, so you will spend less time sorting them out afterwards.
Unfortunately using the “Manual Reset” feature will also mess around your file numbering an you will lose track of your shutter actuations.

Canon EOS batch file renamer

As an owner of a Canon EOS 30Dand previously the Canon EOS 10D I have felt these limitation for quite some time and tried to overcome them a few weeks ago by writing the Canon EOS batch file renamer.
The purpose of this program is to batch rename all images in a specified directory starting from a given image number.
e.g.: If the last file name of the last image you downloaded on your pc is _MG_1404.CR2 and you have reseted you camera. Just run the Canon EOS file renamer and give him the path where the pictures are located and 1404 as a starting number and the program will rename all the files in the given folder starting from _MG_1405.CR2 taken into consideration deleted images from the camera.

Features

1) This software can work both with arguments, Usage EOSFileRenamer.vbs “directory path” “number to start with”, or if no arguments are provided it will pop-up for input
2) This software will take into consideration if images were delete during the photo session while renaming, e.g. if on the given folder file number are _MG_0004.CR2, _MG_0006.CR2 the renamed files would be _MG_1404.CR2 and _MG_1406.CR2

Know issues

* I wrote Canon EOS batch file renamer in VBS so it should work only on Windows OS
* It will work fine as long as you don’t delete neither the first, nor the last picture taken in a specific session

Download

If you want get EOSFileRenamer.zip

Conclusion

I wrote this program for my personal use and I am sharing it as is, without any warranty.

*** Updates ***
October 31st 2006: I have added a new feature to the EOS file remover, it will now remember the last file number and will prompt you whether it should use this value or you’d like to overwrite it.