Ingesting 8 cards at once... identifying the readers?

I'm failing to see the point. But your best bet would probably be to name the cards, so when the mouth you see the names, and write the names on the portion of the SD cards that sticks out.

Edit: � so when they mount�

I don't get it.

You give the cards different names; the readers don't have names. At least on a Mac...

The problem is that an application that is simultaneously reading from several different pieces of media will finish at different times. It would be nice to let the user know which one he could replace with a fresh card so the application could continue its batch "ingestion" job. The problem is two-part: the programmer has to identify the device handling the card in question, and then the program must give the user a way to identify the card that needs to be removed.

Marc, I suggested one or two things in response to your original post - did any of them help? From a user's standpoint I kind of like the idea of making any LED that might be on the reader blink when the app is done with it - that should be an easy and harmless but inelegant repetitive read hack. Am I right to presume you are just grabbing the "/Volumes/CARD_NAME" (Mac) or "Q:" (Windows) mountpoint name and parsing the directory tree for image files to ingest? You should be able to get unique device IDs from the device driver - after all, that's what the OS does to satisfy read and write requests to different devices. Each card is mounted from a sequentially numbered /dev/diskN (Mac) or \devices\abc:xyz:disk:N (or some such on Windows) device node, so you should be able to do something with that disk ID. Again, as with Windows, the device nodes will be numbered in the order that cards are inserted, so there is no persistence across card mount/dismount or machine reboots.

With regard to naming the cards, Marc points out that it is better to not format them on the computer but to let the camera do that. I don't know whether other cameras may be different, but Canon DSLRs give any card the same name: "EOS_DIGITAL". In Marc's scenario you would then end up with 8 cards with the same name attached to 8 readers with the same name.

>>> In Marc's scenario you would then end up with 8 cards with the same name attached to 8 readers with the same name.

How bout this. You have 8 cards. Put card#1 in, select the card's name "EOS_DIGITAL", and type "1". Repeat for card#2, except type "2". Ditto through card#8.

Then just drag all the files from each card to a folder. That will cause 8 simultaneous copy operations; each ending at different times depending on card contents.

I fail to understand why you want so many readers.

On my Windows PC I can rename each drive but only when a drive or card is inserted. When it is reinserted the name shows. I would think the same applies to Mac. An unmounted drive doesn't know what is to be there.

I guess I didn't explain the problem very well.

Any scheme that involves putting cards in slowly, one-by-one, and waiting for them to mount won't work. It's too timing dependent, and that's not the way busy photographers with several cards to ingest work. The scheme has to be absolutely foolproof. Insert the cards, press a button, and go.

I did think over Peter's suggestions from last time, but I don't think the schemes are workable. In use, the lights sometimes blink and sometimes not. Going by a certain pattern isn't reliable enough... too much risk that the wrong card might be ejected. Anything based on order of insertion is too flakey. One slip up and the images could be ruined if the wrong card is removed.

There are indeed device IDs, but they identify the driver "minor number" assigned to the drive, and aren't fixed. No way to physically label the reader with a device number that would be constant. (Unless reader manufacturers assign a unique description, of course, which they currently do not.)

Brad's idea is to manually ingest the cards. Again, not suitable for a high-speed production environment.

Why have 8 readers? So that a photographer coming back from a shoot with 8 cards can just stick them all in, press a button, and go off to do something else while they ingest. Otherwise, he or she would have to sit there and monitor the ingestion until the 8 cards were dealt with.

Giving cards different names would actually work, since the names do show up. However, are there cameras that do that? None that I personally own do so. Does anyone have a camera that allows labeling of the card?

Formatting on the computer has other risks. While it solves the naming problem, it potentially causes other, worse problems.

Again, I need to emphasize: Any naming scheme has to be 100% reliable and foolproof even when the user is not concentrating on what's happening. Otherwise, if the wrong card is removed, it's disaster. Because ingestion is the first step in a digital workflow, there is no room for error. (Compare the consequences of an ingestion error to a printing error.)

The reality is that card makers, reader makers, and camera makers seem to have paid no attention to high-production workflow.

I forgot to say why I'm even introducing this topic. It's an attempt to start raising this as a problem. If Lexar, Sandisk, Kensington, Delkin, and the others think their devices are OK, then perhaps this might be one small attempt, in combination with many others, to at least make that debatable.

(Some cameras have serial numbers that appear in the EXIF information, as maker notes. Most don't. But at least those that do provide a way to distinguish, say, one Leica M8 from another. Too bad the card reader makers don't do the same thing. That's all that would be needed.)

>>> Brad's idea is to manually ingest the cards. Again, not suitable for a high-speed production environment.

Why not? A person has to manually insert the cards into a card reader. Is there some type of automatic ingestion possibility? Changing names to a number, maybe adds 2 seconds. Very small compared to the ingestion time.

>>> Any naming scheme has to be 100% reliable and foolproof even when the user is not concentrating on what's happening.

If you have 8 cards, each named "1" through "8", that seems straightforward. I just tried it with three cards - seems to work...

Is there a better naming scheme, that's more reliable, perhaps?