R6 file name issue after 9,999...

[canon7dude]

R6 file name issue

I shot 14360 images at my son’s all day volleyball tournament with my Canon R6. Imported to my MAC with the latest version of EOS utility.

The images are of action sequences shot at 20fps. I generally flag one image from a good action sequence to process further. It is important for the images to be in the proper sequence to do this efficiently.

My main problem/issue is Canon cannot number images after 9,999 and starts over at 1. It does add a hyphenated number after the first 9,999 but nothing I have can sort it so in this  case of 14360 shots the last 4360 images are jumbled together with the first 4360 images when sorted by filename.

I can use sort by time instead of sort by name but this does not completely work well because some will be transposed. Canon only records to the second and at 20fps sometimes the images are out of sequence.  LRC seems to transpose less than MAC finder but neither is super good at it.

Currently my workflow is to download to SSD with Canon EOS utility, import to LRC, make 2 (or more if over 20K) sub folders, I sort by time and manually move 9,999 images into each folder. In the sub folder I sort by name and rename them with a 1,2, or 3 prefix depending on the folder. 

Now I can sort by name and the photos will be in the proper order. 

This workflow works but takes a very long time to set up with so many images involved. Is there a way to view the images in the correct order? In MAC finder, or Adobe LRC, or some Canon product?

[p4pictures · Accepted solution]

There are a couple of ways to do this, but you need to rename the files as they are imported to the computer. 

Firstly the 9999 images limitation is down to the industry standard EXIF naming that requires an image filename to be 8-characters in length, with the last four characters being numeric and incremented for each shot. This is why files run from IMG_0001 to IMG_9999 before the camera creates a new folder on the card and starts again with IMG_0001. 

If you are importing images from the camera with EOS Utility, then it can be configured to rename the files and include the folder number as part of the filename. This then means that your files will alphabetically be in order.

As an example, 100IMG_9998, 100IMG_9999, 101IMG_0001, 101IMG_0002

You can do this with a custom filename structure in the EOS Utility preferences by simply prepending the folder number to the camera original filename. 

Here's how that is achieved…

Secondly, you can also achieve the almost the same result by prepending the shooting time to the filename. This can be done with Lightroom on import or with EOS Utility.

eg: IMG_9999 renames to 154203IMG_9999 using the time stamp 15:42 and 03 seconds. 

At 20fps it will take 500 seconds (8 minutes 20 seconds) to shoot 9999 images, so the IMG_0001 in the new folder will have a different timestamp. However there is a possibility that you have some out of order images when the folder is created. You might see 154203IMG_9999 and then 154203IMG_0001 which will mess up the sort order for a few images.

[pcs1]

I also use EOS Utility to rename on import, Brian already explained perfectly how to do that.

I've set it up so that as soon as I connect my camera to PC EOS Utility opens and starts to download, renaming to YYYYMMDD-camera model- XXXXXXX, like this: 20251022EOS R10451645 and copying the files to a folder I named "to be processed raw", in subfolders named with the date taken.
When downloading is complete DPP automatically opens and I use that to select/delete etc.(after that it's DxO PR and C1Pro).

[canon7dude]

Thank you Brian! I owe you a beer! This is exactly the info I was looking for, thank you for such a detailed response.

[canon7dude]

Thank you. This will save me lots of work

[p4pictures]

God I love virtual beer 🙂 

In the EOS Utility preferences you can also set the startup option as pcs1 mentioned. Set it to automatically download new images and then you're all set.