How can two people track who shot each photo when sharing one camera?

Question

My wife and I often share one camera on outings and take turns shooting, sometimes also swapping lenses or shooting video. Later, we may not remember who took which image. Our styles are similar, so judging by the photos isn’t reliable.

Is there a practical way to mark authorship when multiple people use the same camera? I’m interested in simple habits, camera features, or workflow tricks that can be recovered later from the files or card structure. The camera we use is a Sony A7 II, but I’d also like to know about methods that work on other cameras.

user11924 · Accepted Answer

There isn't really any surefire way, other than meticulous bookkeeping, or following consistent habits.

Some ideas:

Use your mobile phone to take images of the rear LCD info page showing the file name for the first and last image each of you take each time you operate the camera. For instance, if you take a dozen pictures, when you're done shooting for a bit or if you handoff the camera to your wife, before it leaves your hands, take a picture of the info page for DSC12345, and another for DSC12357.
Use the notes or dictation feature on your phone to take a quick memo of the first and last filenames you shot in a sequence. (This is just a variation on the first suggestion).
Whenever you start to shoot anything, first take a picture of your left hand. Similarly, your wife would do the same. Presumably you can the difference between your and her hands. Then when you're organizing the images later, you'll just know that every picture following your hand was taken by you, until there's a picture of her hand. Etc. ...
Probably the easiest is for you to each carry your own memory cards, and just swap cards in and out when you hand over the camera. This has the potential to add a bit of wear-and-tear to the card slot, but professional photographers usually do a lot of card swapping themselves, and things usually work fine. Since the Sony a7-II has an SD card slot, you could use MicroSD cards, and keep the MicroSD-to-SD adapter in the camera as a "prophylactic" for the camera's card slot.
Finally, and this goes along with the previous point: I don't know about Sony cameras, but I know Nikons can save and restore custom settings from the memory card(s). One of the custom settings is Copyright, which gets written to each image's EXIF data. So you and your wife could each set the Copyright custom setting (assuming Sonys allow that) with your respective names, and restore the settings each time you put your own card in the slot. That way, if you're consistent, each image would have the correct Copyright field, which you can use to identify who took the shot.

How can two people track who shot each photo when sharing one camera?

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