Naming images files?

[AstroM1]

Hi AstroFriends!

I am new to astrophotography... I am curious to know how you "named" your images files...

Let's say you start with a Autosave.fts from DSS... So once you start the file "treatment's" in PI, PS or Gimp, how do you name them afterward to be able to follow the various treatment steps of the image and be able to identify that a few days/months later?

Hope, my writing is not to bad, so you will understand

Merci from Québec!

Marc

[Pete Presland]

welcome to SGL Marc, you writing is fine.

I have seperate folders for all my images, planets, lunar, Solar, DSO's, comets, meteors, widefield..... Then sub folders for different planets, solar white light, H/A. I always name with date and time EG. 2021.01.05 18.57, then name of object imaged. hopefully they store in chronological order then. 🙂

[AstroM1]

6 minutes ago, Pete Presland said:

welcome to SGL Marc, you writing is fine.

I have seperate folders for all my images, planets, lunar, Solar, DSO's, comets, meteors, widefield..... Then sub folders for different planets, solar white light, H/A. I always name with date and time EG. 2021.01.05 18.57, then name of object imaged. hopefully they store in chronological order then. 🙂

Thanks! I am doing something similar!

Cheers, Marc

[Chefgage]

I start with a folder say named M31 Andromeda Galaxy. In this will be another folder for example called 25-12-2020 CLS Light pollution filter. Then in this folder will be a few folders called Lights, Darks, Bias, Flats and Processed. I sort out all the images into the relevant folders. Then the stacked image called Autosave (from DSS) goes in the Processed folder. From then on any exported processed images or GIMP files go in the Processed folder.

[carastro]

I have the following folder.

1. Raw/Fits files

2. Stacked and processed files

3. PNG files (these are the finished images ready for posting on forums.

 

Raw fits files: will have separate folders for each target i.e. M31, M45 etc etc, and each of these folders contains all the flats, Darks and Bias for each target.

Stacked and Processed: will have a stacked file for each target  and within each target folder, I have the stages of processing (for mono imaging RGB, Luminance, Ha ect etc both linear and processed.

This way i can find and go back to old data and either re-process if I feel I can do a better job, or combine with data processed at a later date.

Carole  

 

[7170]

For most of my images I have a folder name that corresponds to the catalog name, then the date, then everything is saved in there. Not elegant, and I need to sort it out, but at least I can find things quickly.

For double stars I got fed up with the above approach and manually logging things in excel, so I made my own application to log and catalog things and make reports. It is run from the base of the images directory and uses relative path's to link to images in the directory structure so if everything is moved the relative paths will still work. Again using the simple "Object Name\Capture Date\" approach.

US date format is also best for sorting things I find too, as it always filters correctly based on the name -> YYYY-MM-DD.