Industrial repair shop camera needed

[bentov]

I have a repair shop where we photograph machinery to document damage & repairs. That process bogs down at upload time (naming/pathing images). Is there a camera I can buy that will name the image files as desired when the shots are taken? We just want to enter a job number somehow on the camera itself, take a bunch of photos, then upload them later without extra steps, have the images be automatically named "job#.01, .02, .03, etc." so they're easy to locate. The standard date & time info that's normally captured will provide all the additional data we'll ever need. I've been doing a lot of Googling this morning, learning about metadata & exif files, but the only camera I've seen that seems to have onboard menu access to metadata is a high end ($4k) Panasonic video unit.

I'm surprised I can't find something like that. Hard drive space is cheap, pictures are way more efficient than note taking, seems to me every kind of repair business would want each tech to have such a job camera - nothing fancy, just a rugged point n shoot with that extra feature. Most of the shots will never be looked at, very aggravating to have to review/name/route them just so they'll be locatable later IF needed.

[SmartWombat]

File/folder naming is possible on Canon high end DSLRs at about £1200, which is rather expensive and probably totally overkill on the camera spec.

Most people just rename the files after copying them to the computer.
Or just drag/drop them to the appropriately named folder.
Seems to me using the camera to name them is inefficient, because it's not got a keyboard.

If you use a card reader to load images to the computer, and not the camera, and if you use one memory card per job, then you just need to drag the images off the memory card into a folder named JOBXXX on the computer.
SD memory cards are cheap enough to keep one per job as a record (until the job is complete) that you could use almost any camera to do it that way.

You could do it manually like I still do at car shows, first photo is the name/number of the stand so I know where I was and who to file it under. Then all photos after that are of that stand.
At each different location there is something that makes a key image to identify the following group.
Then I can order them by file name (they are all sequentially numbered) and know the relationship between the images.
Just photograph the job card first, and you know what images are for what job.

But I wonder, with high resolution (8MP) appearing now on cellphones and tablets, if there's a market for an application to do what you want.

My Nokia C3-00 almost does it.
Under Settings I can change the "title" of the photo.
The "title" is the first letters of the filename and the sequential number kept by the camera is the end of the name.
If I set the title to job1 then the file is named job10042.jpg
Set the title to job2 then the next file is named job20043.jpg

Close to what you want, and the cellphone only cost £49.
And it has a full qwerty keybaord too.
But I'm sure the quality isn't what you need.

I think your solution may lie not in a traditional camera, but down the cellphone or tablet route.

[bentov]

Thanks for your reply. I'm actually doing it now as you describe (snap the job card, all that follow go with that job till the next card shot), and doing the naming at the time of download (via the Windows tool, type a name for the group & choose the destination folder). It's a bit tedious though - need to expand the practice so will be even more bother, don't want to distract my repair techs by delegating the task.

If we had the right tool (file name settable camera) I could just train everyone to always enter the job number before snapping any photos. Then when the card is nearly full (or end of the day or week, whatever) we could just dump everything in a "photos" folder without messing around reviewing and naming images, but still be able to find them quickly when needed.

I'm intrigued by your cell phone/tablet suggestion (and yes, need some kind of keyboard, though numeric entry only would suffice). We don't need fantastic resolution (usually leave it on VGA to keep things emailable), biggest thing is good closeup performance for capturing nameplate info. Guess I could experiment with my Blackberry but wouldn't want to supply those for the shop floor - maybe there's a way to use deactivated cell phones (so no monthly bill!) as cameras with keyboards, if the naming routine could be short and simple . . . we like to take lots of shots, so wouldn't want to have to fiddle with the keyboard for each one. Is that the deal on your Nokia C3-00, one photo per title entry, or will it do a group under one title?

[bentov]

Thanks for your responses. In another forum I learned some cameras allow editing of the DCF prefix, sounds interesting except that our job numbers have 5 digits (and will get longer, of course). I do use a naming system currently that keeps things organized well enough, but it takes time . . . going forward I want a lot more photo (and maybe video, audio, etc.) documentation, so what's already a bottleneck will get worse.

You know how, when you plug in a device, Windows recognizes it and asks what to do, and whether to do the same thing each time that same device is connected? My ideal thing would be for it to recognize a Job Camera, automatically dump everything from it into a JobPhoto folder. If the photos have been named by the taker per the job being documented, no further categorization would be necessary. My relational database repair application software is already powerfully searchable, so this method of acquiring visual data would be a real breakthrough (i.e. say we're working on a motor, wonder how we handled something in the past - we can search by nameplate info, customer, motor type, etc., etc., so any match takes us straight to a similar past job along with all attached photos & other data). I'm overhauling our shop floor procedures right now, all our forms & checklists, etc., thinking the whole scheme could be vastly improved with the right imaging tool - fast computers and big hardrives change everything!

Someone in another forum pointed me to an iphone ap http://www.iphoneappsplus.com/photog...sort/index.htm that looks promising, and another person advised it might work on an ipad touch so I wouldn't have to pay phone carrier bills. Guess I'll pursue that, see how it goes. I would think lots of businesses could use something similar, folks who, like me, dread the download chore (that gets worse when you put it off a few days, have to slog through all those images, decide what to call them, where to put them . . .)