What's in a name?

[photorat]

I'm curious what members of this forum think about the practice of naming photographs? How do you baptize yours? Friedlander's monotonous practice of naming his after the time and place they were taken seems to lend (or remind us of) a certain necessity to what otherwise strike us as arbitrary images. But there are other ways of course: reference to the "subject", a witty "caption", or just what pops into your head first, ... What do you prefer? Do you consider it important to have a consistent style, to include reference to the location, situation, occasion, etc.?

Feel free to accompany any examples with a photograph. 🙂

 

[Nh3]

The practice of simply naming the location and year is all that is needed, or a short factual name like sunrise, young girl, kids playing etc... Also some context in case the message is not obvious and its a photo journalistic shot - but a very short and concise one.

Naming photographs with abstract wording and writing a paragraph about them is pretentious and its akin to a sales pitch to make a product more attractive.

 

[Al Kaplan]

http://thepriceofsilver.blogspot.com

So am I naming the photo, captioning the combination of the photo and the text, being pretentious, or just having fun?

 

[Keith]

http://thepriceofsilver.blogspot.com

So am I naming the photo, captioning the combination of the photo and the text, being pretentious, or just having fun?

I'd have to vote for ... 'having fun!' 🙂

 

[cmedin]

Cindy Sherman is good at consistent naming. 🙂

 

[dmr]

I will often times name mine "Untitled". 🙂

Other than that, I find myself sometimes using a variation of something that's familiar, like "Positively 10th. Street", "Up The River", often something that notes the subject, or whatever comes to my mind at the time.

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

Sometimes a title is deserved. Sometimes it's obvious. Sometimes it's really silly to have one. Sometimes not everything is all the time.

 

[rbiemer]

As much as I really like horrible puns, I try to not use them for titles. I do tend to use fairly simple descriptive titles; "wet branches" for this one. The file name is "wet branches small" as a way of distinguishing it from the larger version I may print from.
Rob

 

[newspaperguy]

Because my filing system (?) is so disorganized, I tend to attatch names that will remind me of the content, rather than entertain others. To that, I add the month/year code, thusly: 1108 (or backassward if you prefer.)

 

[Spider67]

Living in Austria I once got the reaction to names "do they have to be in English?".....kept me thinking: Well yes it has become the lingua franca of photography thanks to certain very German details in history.
Said that both is legitimate, sometimes without title (in German o.T= ohne Titel) can also be preposterous like "If you need a title/name then you are not a real photoconoisseur"

 

[Keith]

When it doesn't matter **** seems to work ok!

 

[Roger Hicks]

I'm with NH3. Short, descriptive titles may be dull, but if there's one thing more dull, it's 'No Title' or 'Untitled' or 'o.T.' or 'Sans Titre' (all right, Magritte got away with it). And I'd rather have dull than pretentious.

Cheers,

R.

 

[Micky D]

I suppose it depends how you catalogue your images on your computer.

I'm not very fond of "DSC_0219", for example.

 

[photorat]

Cindy Sherman is good at consistent naming. 🙂

A rare example where the titles are even more inspired than the actual photographs.

 

[mhv]

I use a surrealistic naming system so that I can associate names with pictures.

Even though I know most of the time where and when I took a picture, something like "Montreal, december 11" would not ring any bell in my mind.

So I just do what Magritte did: look at the image, and name it with the first idea that comes to mind, regardless of relevance.

That way, later on when I look at my sales files, I can immediately remember which picture I sold without having to search for the print or the scan.

 

[ClaremontPhoto]

I'm with mhv (above).

All my photos have titles that make sense to me 'Catarina and her Grandmother', 'Market on a Saturday', 'Showery Friday Morning in Spring' sort of thing.

 

[robertdfeinman]

Purpose

Purpose

If you are naming your images just to find them on your computer then a cataloging program which allows you to add tags or keywords might be useful.

If you are posting your images online and want people to be able to find them via Google then you need to give the image a meaningful name. Most people search on nouns, so "34th Street, NYC" will be found, while "a study in blue" won't.

This is a shortcoming in all schemes which aim to index non-print media. The search engines, like Google, don't even use the EXIF data that you could include in the image files.

I still shoot film and file my images by format and date. The computer copies have my Google descriptive names, but it doesn't help much if I want to find one again.