Lauralena wrote: … Just wondering why others have been named according to what was photographed.
Here's the thing: In Photos, the "filename" has little or no use. Photos remembers the filename, and you can use it in searches, but the filename is an artifact from the way the picture was handled before it got to Photos.
There are lots of problems with filenames-- as you point out, they're not very descriptive. And there's likely to be three different pictures named IMG_0022.jpg, for instance. So Photos immediately changes the filename of a picture to a unique identifier, and then adds the historical file name to its database for reference.
The "Filename" comes from a system of managing together many different sorts of files with different characteristics, and the filename is the only characteristic that they all have. But pictures in Photos are handled as images-- Photos is an image management system (not a file management system,) and it works because they are all images, and so they have lots of characteristics in common other than the filename. Not all pictures in Photos are files, so filename has less meaning.
For instance, when you edit or crop a picture, that image is not a file, but rather it is information combined in a database. When you save that as a file, as tubesarmey suggests, you create a new file, so it can have whatever name you like. But unlike the picture that is in Photos, the new file doesn't have everything in it-- it doesn't have the ability to recreate the original or undo its edits, for example.
So, if you put your information in the Caption, rather than in the filename, then that metadata travels with the picture (or not, if you choose) so that it appears in every version. The caption can be very long-- I have family trees (more or less) in some captions.
Well, the point I want to make here is that we have been conditioned to think of the filename as being an important part of a file, but that is not necessarily true for pictures. It may be that doing the work of changing all those filenames will turn out to be not what you really want, and you'll later want to add information to captions anyway-- so you will have done the naming thing twice, sort of.
By the way, I've changed thousands of pictures' filenames! I had decades of images and backups, and as many as 15 copies of many of them, and a great mess. So I started out dealing with the files, renaming in mass so I could compare similar files, for instance and, like Matti, using other apps all outside of Photos. As I cut out duplicates and crazy pictures, the filenames became less useful. Then I pulled them into Photos. I don't ever do that, any more.
Well, I hope this at least offers some perspective…
