I need some ideas/suggestions on file naming conventions for scanned images (photos, documents, etc.). I have hundreds of digitized images, (1870-2003) and giving each image a meaningful name is a problem. The basic format I have been using is: lastname_firstname_middlename.jpg (e.g. brown_john_wesley.jpg). I always use the middle name or initial, if known, because given names recur so often in families. If I find two individuals with exactly the same name (as in Sr. and Jr.), I add the birth year to differentiate between them (e.g. brown_john_wesley_1818.jpg). I often have multiple photos of the same individual, so I resort (reluctantly) to adding a sequence number at the end (e.g. brown_john_wesley_02) I tried researching through Google groups for suggestions, but found nothing really satisfactory. Some researchers use a number-coded index, and don't try to give meaningful names to individual files. This means the index must stay with the photos, which I think is fraught with unanticipated difficulties. For one, how do you extract a sub-set of your images with its associated subset of the master index?. I�d like to stay away from an indexed system if at all possible. Another researcher suggested a coded name based on the first 3 characters of the surname, followed by initials, followed by a sequence number. I have tried a similar methodology in the past and found that the names soon became quite meaningless. Another suggestion was to create a folder for photos taken in a given year, with the photos given a coded alphanumeric file name. This will probably work well for high volumes of recent snapshots, but how do you ever hope to find all the photos of a particular individual in such a system? And, what if you don�t know the year the photo was taken? I have just started putting my photos into folders by last name. Unfortunately, I have most of my photos hot-linked to my descendancy charts, so that means I have to add the folder name to all my HTML photo references. (ouch!). Photos with two or more individuals in them are a whole other issue. My practice has been to name group photos after some prominent individual in the group. I don�t feel comfortable with that convention, and will probably move to more discriptive names in the future. I try to link the descendancy chart entry for each individual to their appearance in each group photo. Group photos are an area where I�m really open to new ideas. I don�t have a good system for naming scanned birth/death/marriage certificates, letters, wills, real estate records, etc.. I also have many digitized images of old family homes. Lasty, at one time I intended to add captions to my scanned images, but I can�t find software that accomplishes the task very easily. Graphic Workshop works well for most tasks, but when you use it to add a caption, it creates a new file which must be re-named, and the original file deleted (very tedious when you're dealing with hundreds of images). So, any suggestions? I hope I'm not the only one feeling overwhelmed ;>) John CC, Carter Co.,Ky. --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software