Canon R5 File Numbering Fiasco Shooting 2 Cards

Jake Shoots Birds

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Jake Kurdsjuk
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I was shooting yesterday morning with my R5 set up as it has been for a long time with stills going to card 1 and video to card 2. It was a great day's shoot but when I got home and went imported my images I noticed I had up to 7 images with the exact same filename, so the import was adding a '-2' thru '-7' extension on them. The camera also had the image number roll over from 9999 to 0001, so I wound up with 7 folders each starting with files numbered 0001 and then jumping, inexplicably to 99xx. Hmmmm.

I put card 1 back in the reader and looked at what I had, and I saw that each time it created a new folder it would restart at 0001 and proceed until it jumped to a 99xx number. There was no rhyme or reason to when it jumped, but when that jump occurred the starting number incremented by 1 each time. Hmmmm again.

My first priority was getting the image file names sorted out so I could import them properly, but as I did that I thought about the second card and the video files on it. When I finally looked at them most were sequentially numbered even though they were shot throughout the day. There was a gap in numbering between the first (9951) and the next three (9962-9964) which were shot one after the other, but no gaps after that.

The TLDR of it all is that after the image file numbering rolled over on card 1 that never occurred on card 2, so every time I shot a video it got the next in sequence filename from card 2 and then continued from there on card 1. So after video 9965 wrote to card 2 the new folder on card 1 got 9966 and went on from there until it hit 9999, created another new folder, and started once again from 0001, with the process repeating every time I shot a video.

Has anyone ever experienced this?! Seems to me that this shouldn't happen.

Additional details that will likely be of interest to any sleuths here:
  • No, I did not reformat card 1 before the shoot (this is usually a habit), but card 2 had been reformatted and had no images/videos at the start of the day.
  • I'm using a custom naming prefix that allows me to identify the camera being used so there are no collisions across cameras.
  • When I shoot video I simply press the record button at the top of the camera and do not specifically change camera modes.
  • I've worked this way before and the file numbering across cards has always incremented consistently across the 2 cards when the 9999 threshold wasn't crossed.
 
Last edited:
I have not experienced this renaming but I rename anyway when I import so camera assigned names don't really matter to me once they are in my LR catalog.
 
Hi, Jake.

It would take me at least 20 minutes of studying your note to try to figure out what happened, plus draw a diagram, plus find out what TLDR means, and I might quite possibly still be unable to solve it. o_O

The best thing IMO is to format both cards next time you do an exercise like this. If the issue doesn't happen again, problem solved.

(Maybe the camera was resetting its file names every time it went back to Card 1 where you still had files.)
 

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