Here’s one thing you might never have thought of, but as a professional I had to deal with it today:

Take a good look, especially at the two selected photos. Same exact camera-assigned name, but one has “_1″ after it. What is this? Well, the images were from two completely different weddings, in fact they were taken in different years. You see, my camera recycles it’s numbering every nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine shutter clicks, counting from 0001 all the way up to 9999 and then over again. Of course I’ve never taken ten thousand photos at just one event, but over the years I have “rolled over” my old camera 7 or 8 times, and my new camera is about to roll over if it hasn’t already.

So whenever I go through my landscape photos and compile a “beach” gallery, or in this case when I’m going through ALL the weddings I’ve ever shot to re-find any portfolio material, …I end up with the possibility of over-writing an image if I accidentally add another image with the same exact name.

I did this a couple times before I figured out what was going on, but then I worked around the problem by opening up images in Bridge and then saving them to my main portfolio bin. Whenever Bridge comes upon a redundancy, it adds that “_1″ to the end so that I don’t lose any images.

Learn something new every day, eh?

-Matt-