During import, you can use the capture date as part of the filename, but it uses a four digit year. Is there a way to only use a two digit year (e.g. 12 vs 2012)? Do I need to learn some AppleScript? Can I find the built-in presets somewhere in the application folder or are they hardcoded into Aperture?
Walter,
You can’t do a 2-digit year, no, and yes those “modules” are hardcoded into Aperture.
While I usually refrain from asking why, I’m going to ask here :-) A four digit year lasts forever (well, at last for the next 7,988 years) whereas a two digit year will be obsolete in just 88 years. For those extra two characters, I’d rather start avoiding the Y3K problem now. Plus what is a “12”… a month, a day, or a year? Whereas “2012” can only be one thing. Less confusing to anyone else looking at your filenames.
@PhotoJoseph
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This reminds me of a challenge I had the other week at work. Too many cooks in the broth, or in this case a massive spreadsheet listing thousands of IT related projects. I was going through the data looking for some specif information and figured that I could cull a lot by using the project end date. Sadly, while some 55% of the projects had valid “dates” entered, there was about 20% that had the date entered as text. In there I found year-month-day, and day-month-year. All expected for Canada. But, there were some whom had been influenced by the great nation to the south of us and were using month-day-year. And, a huge percentage of these test were two digit entries for all three, namely the day, month and year.
Personally, I started in the DOS days with month-day, grew up and realised that year-month-day was a lot smarter, especially when some events, like birthdays, Christmas, etc come around every 365 (or 366) days. Four digit years too. Given that we long ago left the 8.3 file name limitation in Windows (well, 15 with the Apple II, but it didn’t ever do digital photos), having a full date in the file name just makes sense to me. YMMV.
Rgds,