Naming your photographs

[usathyan]

How do you come up with titles for your images? Any thoughts or conventions you follow to name them?

I have had certain situations where i wanted the audience to see what i see but at the same time leave them to their own interpretation. Isnt there a saying that a picture is worth a 1000 words or something? Do all your images that you exhibit have titles?

[alainbriot]

At the very least titles allow you to refer to specific photographs when you talk about them or when you sell them...

That being said if you don't want to use specific titles you can always use "untitled 1," "untitled 2," and so on.  It's been done for years.

[DarkPenguin]

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[Geoff Wittig]

How do you come up with titles for your images? Any thoughts or conventions you follow to name them?

I have had certain situations where i wanted the audience to see what i see but at the same time leave them to their own interpretation. Isnt there a saying that a picture is worth a 1000 words or something? Do all your images that you exhibit have titles?
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I try to pick a title that is brief and descriptive so I have a shot at remembering what it was when someone requests a print two years after I made the first one. Sometimes I'll also include the month and/or year. I try to avoid goofy or pretentious titles that would be embarrassing to read years later. I love some of Robert Glenn Ketchum's work, but his titles often make me think of college students discussing philosophy while stoned at 3 am. And not in a good way.

[francois]

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I like the underscore, no doubt that it would raise a few questions from viewers...

 

[Ken Alexander]

I try to pick a title that is brief and descriptive so I have a shot at remembering what it was when someone requests a print two years after I made the first one. Sometimes I'll also include the month and/or year. I try to avoid goofy or pretentious titles that would be embarrassing to read years later. I love some of Robert Glenn Ketchum's work, but his titles often make me think of college students discussing philosophy while stoned at 3 am. And not in a good way.
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The most memorable titles I've seen lately were at a local gallery a few months back.  The photographer gave his photos names like "The One With The Car" and "The One With The Trees", which is exactly how I would have referred to them later.  The fact that I still remember them months later attests to how effective they were.  Simple and unpretentious...though stoned college students would definitely not approve!

Ken

[dalethorn]

Most O/S's allow 255 byte filenames now, so my advice is to pick generic group names for the folders (i.e. wedding, forest, boating), then name each image file first by what it is, then title.  Example: Wedding_Lucas-Greg A Night To Remember_001.jpg

Two things to remember - the naming convention will help you quickly find what you want no matter how many images you store, and secondly, smart computer users know how to batch-rename thousands of files with filename parsers when the time comes to "upgrade" the filing system, i.e. when you realize down the road that the system you chose wasn't ideal and needs to change.

[alainbriot]

There's several approaches to naming images.  Besides using "untitled" which basically leaves the viewer responsible for figuring out the meaning and contents of the image in its entirety, titles can roughly fall in 2 categories:

Category 1 are factual descriptions of the subject.  In my work, a typical factual title for one of my landscapes would be "Horseshoe Bend, Page, Arizona".  Basically, the title describes the location. It does not specifiy the meaning of the piece.  

Category 2 are titles that point to a specific meaning or source of inspiration.  A typical title for category 2 titles, also in my work, would be "Majestic Sweep of the Colorado River" also referring to the Horseshoe Bend.   Here the exact location is not indicated.  Instead, the artist's vision for this image is revealed.  

Category 2 titles tend to be more more about the artist and less about the subject or location.  They also influence and shape the audience's approach to the image more than factual titles.  

Category 2 titles can feature religious or spiritual references. Category 2 titles can also be worded so as to be more or less revealing of the artist's intent and vision.  These can go from fully revealing titles to titles that subtly point (sorry for splitting the infinitive) to a possible meaning.  In this sense, we could work out sub-categories for Category 2 such as Category 2-A, 2B and so on.

I personally use category 1 titles most of the time, usually placing the name of the geological feature first (Horseshoe Bend in this instance), then the location (Page), then the state (AZ).  If I indicate the season then it would come after the name of the feature (Horseshoe Bend Summer).

I use category 2 titles more rarely, and mostly for those images that are less about a location and more about an idea, or a concept.  For example, In one of my series of Petroglyph photographs (Native American carvings on rocks) I titled one of the images "What I saw in the Cave".  The idea being that I did not want to impose a meaning onto the petroglyph, and I did not want to have a series of images in which repeatitive titles such as "petroglyph 1," "Petroglyph 2," and so on are used.

Those are some thoughts on naming as they come to me this Saturday morning.

[joneil]

I use category 2 titles more rarely, and mostly for those images that are less about a location and more about an idea, or a concept.  For example, In one of my series of Petroglyph photographs (Native American carvings on rocks) I titled one of the images "What I saw in the Cave". 

-snip-

   I really like that title - simple, to the point, tells a story, but lets the viewer decide for themselves.

    I don't know who first said it, or the exact phrase, but I remember a quote I read many, many moons ago in art class about how you should never have to explain your art, be it oil painting, sculpture, etc.    I think the same is true for photography.  Titles, if used, should add to the picture or the "experience", not "do the thinking" for the person looking at your work

joe

[Brad Proctor]

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Seriously though, my images filenames are all numbers.  I keep the sequence number from the camera.  When I go over 9999, I tell lightroom to tack a 1 (or higher) on the front of the filename when importing.  The names of the keepers I store in a database.  Along with a bunch of other stuff such as where it was taken, camera settings, the dimensions of the final print, etc.

I'm not the most creative when it comes to naming my images though.  They usually end up being what the image is of.  Such as "Barn" or "Bird on a Post", etc.

[JDClements]

Sometimes a special name comes to me, so I title the photography as such. Otherwise, I stick with the descriptive style of naming, e.g. "Lily Study #6".

The filenames are a different story. They are either date and sequence (e.g. 20080725_012), and sometimes have a descriptive text (e.g. 20080725_wreckisland_002).

The filenames and image titles are unrelated.

[Daniel Arnaldi]

How a photograph is titled offers clues to how it should be viewed, the subtext of an image is not as obvious to the viewer as it is to the artist that made it. I sometimes find that what I felt about the image that I’m trying to title is a good place to start.

[Panorama]

How do you come up with titles for your images? Any thoughts or conventions you follow to name them?

I have had certain situations where i wanted the audience to see what i see but at the same time leave them to their own interpretation. Isnt there a saying that a picture is worth a 1000 words or something? Do all your images that you exhibit have titles?
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=208955\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

I usually don't name them, but I have in a few cases. Most of the stuff for clients gets their names if provided/requested.

I do have special categories of names I sometimes use. in which case I'll use Bad_001, or Bad_0001 depending on volume. There's also very_bad_0001, WTF_0001, and OMG_0001. I like to remain flexible in case a good one sneaks by, so I'm open to new naming conventions.

[dalethorn]

I've never depended on anything except filenames for name/title info, and that's because when I need to make a change to several hundred images (files), I can do that with a Windows "batch" file, and run it on my main drives (4) and backup drives (6) as well.  I can't imagine a reliable and long-term portable way of doing that kind of automation with EXIF or whatever.