Will do it right away and come back with the result. So you want to compare photos before Dec. 22 and after if it does change its naming structure? I think I got my earliest photo from Dec. 15th.
Doing it now.
@ChuckPa You’re a genius!
I’ll try to show my complete steps taken:
- Created a new library using only the app (iPhone 7) to upload to default location, with no album.
- Started uploading photos. My earliest photos are from Dec. 15th 2016 (from this iPhone 7), so the dates of the photos taken are:
15th, 15th, 19th, 21st etc...there is some date gaps between. - Whilst Uploading (and was uploading really fast, took glimpses of the names) I did notice the naming from
IMG_0000.JPGthen changing toYYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss.JPG - Tried accessing the library, although I did face a minor problem but easily do-able. However, it did show a “Media Not Found. The Media trying to access doesn’t seem to exist”. A quick refresh on the Plex web fixed it.
- Checked both within Plex Library UI and where the photos stored in the drive.
IMG_0000.JPGphotos appeared only on Dec 15th. whileYYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss.JPGphoto naming appeared on Dec 19th and afterwards. - Deleted the library and photos and where the photos stored in the drives and started again from zero. However, I tried now creating a library within plex web UI, assigned a specified storage location, then opened Plex App (iPhone 7) and chose the pre-assigned library with Album. This time when finished uploading, I was not greeted with “Media Not Found. The Media trying to access doesn’t seem to exist”. While the photos did have their names being
IMG_0000.JPGon 15th, andYYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss.JPGon 19th and afterwards. - Re-did the same steps as number 6 above but without adding Album (thought it would matter). However, same behavior exactly, including no error about media not found (which is really very minor and hardly every affected me).
So in summary:
The names of my photos taken on December, 15th 2016 were named as IMG_0000.JPG.
The names of my photos taken on December, 19th 2016 and after, were named as YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss.JPG
(The error about Media not found only shows up when leaving the library to a default location within app, however, it did not show when i already pre-assigned it to a ready made library).
Heres a screenshot of my photos stored within my specified location in the drive including their names and dates if it would help.
(The item highlighted with red is the burst mode (i think) that was activated, while taking the picture, and only one is shown while the other was overwritten).
It is sorted by dates, in “ascending” order.
The “Dates Modified” here are formatted as DD/MM/YYYY hh:mm
I attended University in Germany and have been military. Non-ambiguous date format is very familiar to me 
There is a secondary discussion underway about burst mode handling. Being the weekend, only a few conversations have been had but I suspect that will increase beginning tomorrow. It would be very nice, imho, if there is a universal naming format which PMS can accept and utilize. Such an effort would require coordination with multiple teams to perform ‘burst most playback’ but minimally, if the client apps can upload, this gives a good start and way to preserve the data contiguously in the library.
Yea, would be great if it had a a sequence number to the end of any duplicate photo. I know it might be difficult to implement. But any reason why the naming was changed from IMG… to date/time format? Was it intended or a bug?
PS: The problem isn’t limited to burst mode photos. It also includes if you receive multiple photos and are downloaded to your phone within the same time (such as Whatsapp App where I usually receive multiple photos from my family that they took and I wanted to upload them. However, they’ll all be tagged on when I received in date/time format, and for that it will show as if I took multiple photos within the same second. Only way to over-come that problem is I kinda ask my family to send one photo at a time and to not download them all within the same second, so they will be tagged differently).
By using date/time, there is the (I think) intent to deconflict names, thinking how difficult it would be for people you would receive photos from to all have taken them at precisely the same second whereas sequence numbers are more likely to collide (only 4 digits long before wrapping). For some, 10,000 photos isn’t much.
I’m sure this will all evolve. Had I known of the feature (but i’m not included in that discussion) I would have asked a few questions possibly not previously asked (like what we see now).
When i receive photos from family, I get them as unique filenames by my email client. I don’t get collisions. I get the names they provide. Maybe that’s the difference with web based versus client-based email?
@ChuckPa said:
When i receive photos from family, I get them as unique filenames by my email client. I don’t get collisions. I get the names they provide. Maybe that’s the difference with web based versus client-based email?
Yea I mean I do get the unique names of the original photo via email, but once you upload it to PMS, its converted to date/time. Even if I receive a very old photo, once it touches my phone and try to upload it, PMS will re-name it into date/time and tag it as if I just took that photo.
So is it safe to assume that the date/time is actually renamed on PMS side when uploading? I’m doubting my iphone here 
I’ve got that point too. lots to work out. This is a new change.
Thank you @ChuckPa for confirming it, can’t imagine the workload 
Thanks again for the updates!
I am seeing related behavior. I setup both my wife and I using the steps described here. My phone (setup first) renames the photos. My wife’s phone does not.
Also, some important notes. Not renaming the photos does not prevent overwriting. The file naming scheme can only handle 10,000 images before recycling names. Apple handles that by creating new folders when the numbers recycle. However, you can hit the overwriting issue long before 10,000 photos if you use airdrop. When you receive an airdrop of photos or videos Apple prefers to not rename the files. Only renaming if at time of receipt you have an identically named file on your device. The easiest way to have this happen is take photos, back them up, delete them from device, receive airdrop of photos with same filename. I have had this happen to me repeatedly when backing up by hand.
