I share all of my railroad and history related pictures on my photo sharing site Railroad Crossing Photo Gallery (RR PICS) located at rrpics.chadleighkluck.net. The site contains my complete photo library, however select photos (the good ones) will eventually appear on Picasa and make their way to my Google Maps.
You may download, modify, and share the photos for any non-commercial use as long as you provide proper attribution and you maintain the same sharing policy. (Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike).
I do have copies available without the watermark in the upper left corner. The watermark is just a gentle reminder to give me attribution as well as a reminder to myself of the file name the picture is stored under. If you would like a high resolution photo without the watermark, feel free to contact me.
Minnesota Commercial 484 on the Hugo Line
File Naming Conventions
I try to store as much location and subject information as possible in the image name. This includes state, city, street, date, and view for stationary objects (buildings) or road name, equipment type, location subject was captured, date for things that move (railroad equipment).
Here are two examples:
- UP-6318-exSP_2010-03-31_1437_NE-Fremont_Between-Main-St-and-Union-St_Rear-of-eastbound-coal-train_001.jpg (View)
- NE-Fremont_E-6th-St_106_2006-08_Schwesers_072.jpg (View)
In the first example a moving object is captured. Since this object has the possibility of moving to another location next time it is captured I begin by identifying it with the road name and number. Since the object will change over time I want to capture the date (and in this case time in 24-hour format) so that when I sort the pictures of UP-6318-exSP by name, they appear in chronological order. Note that whenever I capture a picture of UP-6318 I will need to note that it is exSP (ex-Southern Pacific for it to appear in chronological order). I used to add the type of locomotive (i.e. GP-38) but that got to be too detailed and bogged down my uploading of new pictures. I would come back with over 100 photos and spend five minutes each looking up the engine class.
In the second example we have an immovable object (though I guess you could theoretically move buildings, but I have not yet experienced a subject moving on me yet). We start by listing the address in reverse order (state, city, street, address) and then add the date (YYYY-MM-DD format). This is done so that a directory sort groups items properly. Time may be added if it involves an event, such as a demolition of a building where there should be a defined sequence of the pictures. Anything after the date is extra information. I usually like to provide the direction of the view and business names in this location. If the view is of an entire block, the block number is used (E-6th-St_100 for the 100 block of E 6th Street, for example). I don’t distinguish the side of the street for a block shot in the portion before the date, but I do establish the view in the second half of the file name (E 6th Street looking west).
You’ll notice in the second example I only list a year and month. It is a scanned photo for which I have no exact date. You will also notice in both examples, there is a final 3-digit number. That is just an arbitrary number left over from the original process of downloading the pictures from my camera and renaming photos. I leave it on because it helps to ensure unique naming for pictures of the same subject on the same day which otherwise would have conflicting names. Most of the time it is just an unused number and should never be thought to indicate a sequence or serve any other purpose.
Finally, you will notice, if you browse long enough, not all photos follow the naming convention described above. This naming convention was brought into it’s current form in April of 2010. I think it is now perfected and slowly older pictures will have their file names changed to match. Many photos were added prior, and have an old naming convention.
While using addresses, even approximate addresses, is suitable for my purposes now as they will show in Google Maps, I have yet to deal with the eventual issue of streets being renamed, re-routed, or removed entirely. Ideally GPS coordinates would be useful, but my camera doesn’t have GPS and establishing the coordinates in the file name afer spending time to look them up would waste my time. Especially since this is a problem that rarely happens would slow me down. In other words, the solution is more cumbersome the the actual number of times the problem occurs.
