file numbering

Duckys54

SoI've finally shot 10,000 pictures with my Canon 40D but I have a little annoyance: the counter only goes up till 9999. Is there anyway to change that or do I have to deal with resets?

Robinivich

As near as I can tell, this is a canon file system limitation, nothing you can really get around, and I do wish there was a system for me to easily track shutter actuations.

My imperfect solution is to set up the EOS utility software (which I use to download images from the camera, I know, it's slow) and tell the software to add some useful information to the file name, so that instead of IMGxxxx.CR2, I get Rob_40d_022509_xxxx.CR2

It's a lot longer, but I've got my name, which camera (since I've also got a 350D that sometimes sees some use) the date, then a number, which is pretty close to unnecessary now.

And yes, all of that info is in the exif, but the exif doesn't help me if I'm on a computer without the software to read it, or if I don't feel like booting something up to do that.

Richard

The numbering will roll-over to 0000 automatically, so you don't need to reset anything. OTOH, if you are not changing your filenames, you could start to see naming collisions.

I find Canon's numbering system annoying...it's not as if an extra character or two would use up precious storage space. The best way to work around the problem is to rename your files as soon as they are uploaded. This is easy to do in LR, Bridge and other programs.

One thing you may not have noticed is that the folder names on the flash card also carry information. If the full pathname is, say, F:\DCIM\889CANON\IMG_8901, the first digit in 889CANON shows how many times rollover has occurred. So this file could be the 88901st actuation. I say could be rather than would be because x0D cameras have a nasty way of picking up numbering from a card that has been used in a different camera. Tethered shots are treated differently and I'm not sure how this affects the count. I don't know what happens to the folder name when you get to 100,000--does it become 1000CANON or reset to 1CANON? Unless the economy improves (or my camera dies) I'll probably find out this summer.