Folder and File Names for Club PDI Competitions

The several images in an author’s entry should be contained in one folder.

The folder should be named <Author’s first name> <space><Author’s last name>. The author’s name derived from this folder name is used to credit the author of the images during the competition.

Examples of acceptable folder names are:

Susan Harvey
Brian Kennedy
Liz Barlow
Harold Marchmont

The images in the folder should have filenames starting with a 2-digit sequence number followed after one space by the title of the image.

The sequence number is 01 for the first image, then 02, 03, 04 etc., in order. It is used first as a partial check that all the expected images are included in the folder.

The sequence number may also used to prioritise the images in competitions that are oversubscribed. The images with higher sequence numbers might be discarded first, if this proves necessary.

The title that forms the second part of the filename is displayed as the title when the image is projected in the competition.

Filenames must conform to the usual Windows conventions. Avoid punctuation marks and special symbols. Upper and lower case letters and digits are OK, along with space, underline, hyphen, and parentheses.
Windows XP forbids these characters in file names:

* . ” / \ [ ] : ; | ,

Vista rejects these characters:

\ / . : * ? " < > |

(Try putting any of these in a file or folder name and Vista will display this list for you.)

Note particularly that period and comma are not allowed.

Single-quotes are acceptable, as are exclamation marks.

Mac OSX users need to be particularly careful with their choice of file names. Almost anything is acceptable in OSX filenames, where only the colon is illegal.

Please capitalise titles appropriately.

Files must have the appropriate extension ( .jpg .tiff or .tif ) for the type of file used. (Macintosh users should avoid hiding extensions.)

Note that some internet servers will reject file extensions containing upper-case characters, so please always use lower-case, in case the competition organiser wishes to forward your image over the internet.

Typical filenames

Examples of typical filenames are:

01 Sleepy Head.jpg
02 Salisbury - South Isle.tif
03 HMS Victory - Detail.jpg
04 Dawn at Martin Mere.tif
05 “Missed It!”.jpg

© Michael Wood, 25 October 2008. Revised 3 December 2008.

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