kvanhook Loc: Oriental, NC

When I used Nikon I was able to change the file prefix to identify which body was used. With Sony, I have had overlapping file numbers. It was my understanding that the Sony prefix could not be altered. Is that still true? I would like to differentiate the file identifier between three Sony bodies.

nicksr1125 Loc: Mesa, AZ

I think it will depend on which model you have. I have an A7RIII. Here's the menu sequence to get to the file name section. Setup - page 5 - Set File Name. Press the button in the center of the wheel on the right & an abbreviated keyboard will come up. It will take a little getting used to but, you should be able to change the file designation for each body. Other bodies may have the option on a different menu page but, it should be very similar. I have Gary Friedman's book on the A7RIII. It has answered numerous questions on the multitude of menu settings.

kvanhook Loc: Oriental, NC

I have a7ii and a7c. I'll take a look at what you reference. Thanks.

nicksr1125 Loc: Mesa, AZ

They should have very similar menu setups to the A7RIII.

jaredjacobson

I have an A6500 and an A9. I can rename the prefix on both. They’re both newer than the A7II and older than the A7C, so I expect you’d be able to change the prefix at least on the A7C.

photoman43

If you cannot make the needed change in the camera, use a program like Downloader Pro that will allow you to customize the file folder name and image names when you download the images from your cameras. This way you will never have a duplicate image name.

gwilliams6

Most Sony models work the same way, you can easily setup the file naming to reflect which camera the image was made with, no worries then on overlapping numbers from different bodies.

I was able to do that on my A6500, A7RIII, A7III, A9, A7RIV, A1, A7SIII.

Cheers and best to you.

kvanhook Loc: Oriental, NC

Thanks to all. I found it under "File/Folder Settings". Now I can tell which body took the image.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

I enjoyed using Downloader Pro for many years. It allows me to set up a template to define a meaningful name for an image file. You can also do it in Lightroom, but I find DP more efficient and has two advantages over LR name changing on import.

(1) in DP you can set it to ask for a 'job code' when you bring it up (and you can bring it up by plugging a camera card onto an attached reader). The job code could be numeric ID like an invoice number, or a descriptive text string. The descriptive text string can be used for both the file name and the target folder. Lightroom wants separate entries for the file name and the folder name so you have to enter two things (or possibly one thing twice).

(2) DP can add date and time to the file name. Lightroom can do that too, but Lightroom limits the time granularity to 1 second, while DP can use subsecond time at least to 0.01 second. I find that useful for separating burst files with different names. It will depend on your camera, but EXIF data has subsecond tags available.

Alas, DP does not work with MacOS. Windows only. I have not found a similar program for MacOS. I had to write my own.

gwilliams6