Intake User Guide

Appearance

File Naming ​

Background ​

Pixelplace Intake works entirely through open, predictable conventions rather than a proprietary database, ensuring that you always retain full ownership of your files and are never locked into a vendor’s system. You can stop using Intake at any time without losing any of the work you’ve done. Intake also never alters your original files; instead of modifying metadata, it organizes photos by moving them into folders for categorization.

Quick Start ​

Pixelplace Intake keeps your original photo files exactly as they came from the camera — names like IMG_1234.JPG or DSC_5678.NEF stay untouched during the initial curation. Intake simply moves files into folders such as Keep, Change, or Reject while leaving the file contents untouched.

If you enable post‑processing, Intake adds lightweight naming tags to track edits while preserving the base filename. Unedited photos receive an SOOC tag — for example, IMG_1234 (SOOC).JPG. Edited versions append your chosen descriptors, such as IMG_1235 (straighten, lighten).JPG. For composites, you can join multiple source names — IMG_1236-IMG_1237-IMG_1239 (your own tags).JPG — so the final image always remains linked to its originals. This consistent naming lets you restore or reorganize files effortlessly as you refine your selections.

Conventions ​

To support this model, conventions are used:

  1. Specialized folders are used for categorization (Keep, Change, Reject, etc.)
  2. File naming conventions that allow association of originals and modified files (described below)

File Naming ​

Typically your camera manufacturer defaults to specific file naming:

  1. Canon: IMG_NNNN.JPG (standard), CRW_NNNN.CRW (raw)
  2. Nikon: DSC_NNNN.JPG (standard), DSC_NNNN.NEF (raw)
  3. Sony: DSC0NNNN.JPG (standard), DSC0NNNN.ARW (raw)

Intake is intended purely as a photo curation tool in the first phase of processing photos. As a consequence it is expected that the user is simply sorting through their photos determining which to keep and which to discard. Ultimately, during this phase, the user just wants to end up with a subset of the photos that they will then publish in some manner:

  1. To physical print media
  2. To a website for a client or for other purpose
  3. To social media
  4. Other needs

In the publishing phase the user can take care of assigning titles to photos and may actually rename the files at that stage. However, during the "Intake" phase the curator is going to keep the original file names.

Although we've described the Intake phase as a simple categorization process, there's one other challenge associated with this process: the quality of photos straight out of camera may not allow one to easily determine whether they should be kept or not:

  1. Photos may not be straight, so they'll need to be levelled.
  2. Photo lightness may need to be adjusted.
  3. Photo white balance may need to be adjusted.
  4. When multiple shots have been taken it may be best to combine them to produce a final photo (for example, one person smiled better in one of the photos etc.)
  5. Other reasons like cropping, etc.

We recommend that you keep track of these changes via file naming conventions and, when enabling the post-processing workflow, Intake supports file naming as follows:

  1. "SOOC" file naming for files that are unmodified (this happens automatically if enabled so a file like "IMG_1234.JPG" will be called "IMG_1234 (SOOC).JPG") — SOOC stands for "straight out of camera."
  2. Providing your own file name for modifications you've made, for example, if you straightened, lightened, and performed content fill, "IMG_1235.JPG" could be named "IMG_1235 (straighten, lighten, fill).JPG"

When you keep the original base name ("IMG_NNNN") and append your own customizaton in parentheses after this name Intake is still able to associate modified files and original files. That enables the ability to restore files if you decide to back out your post-processing changes by dragging files out of the "Keep" folder (for example).

One other thing to be aware of is when combining files. If you, for example, combine "IMG_1236.JPG", "IMG_1237.JPG" and "IMG_1239.JPG" then you can name the post-processed file "IMG_1236-IMG_1237-IMG_1239 (some modifications).JPG" and Intake is able to associate this with all 3 original files.

File Naming Rules ​

  1. Append " (xyz)" to base file name and perserve extension to add your own custom "tags".
  2. Use dashes between base names to preserve association with multiple files used to produce this final file.