I usually import media from two SD cards at once and it's irritating that Finder is showing both "Untitled" SD cards as simply "Untitled" rather than "Untitled" & "Untitled 1". I just figured out that when I do "ls /Volumes" in terminal the system is recognizing the disks correctly as "Untitled" and "Untitled 1". Apparently there's no defaults write command to fix this behavior in Finder but I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on creating a macro to be triggered when the SD card is inserted to rename the disks in Finder to show as different names.
I've asked a similar question before but then I was under the impression that the system is being silly and not distinguishing between the disks. Since it can tell them apart maybe there's a way to get the actual name of the volume in terminal (Untitled 1) and set its name in Finder to that?
Screenshots of the SD card volumes in Finder & Terminal
They are different SD cards. On my M1 MacBook pro on Ventura when I insert the SD cards, in Finder they show up as "Untitled" and "Untitled 1". For whatever reason on my M4 Max Mac studio they both show up as "Untitled". Apparently not using "Untitled 1, Untitled 2" in Finder has been a thing for many years and I have no clue why my MacBook behaves differently.
The name never refers to a specific card, just the order they were inserted into the computer. I don't use a specific SD card for a particular camera so I never name them. it's just the visual information to distinguish between the cards while I'm importing footage. It's very irritating when I'm not sure which Untitled card I've imported from and having to look at the files inside the cards to tell.
Finder displays the actual volume names, which are "Untitled" and "Untitled" -- you can check that with Disk Utility. But the /Volumes folder can't have two "mount-point" folders with the same name, so adds the postfix to one of them.
The simple solution (unless you can find out why your old MacBook is behaving differently) is to properly name the volumes on your SD cards!
It's really odd that there's nobody else talking about this. I've even tried asking AI and it literally summarizes my own forum post from a few weeks ago back at me.
edit: I think it's also using this forum post...
AI's Wisdom:
"one potential workaround, if you frequently deal with multiple "Untitled" volumes, could be to use a tool like Keyboard Maestro to trigger an action when a volume is inserted, perhaps to rename it to something more descriptive. However, this would be a custom solution rather than a built-in Finder preference."
I could be wrong, but I think maybe because most people tend to rename their external volumes to something applicably descriptive to their use. This would be the definitive solution to your problem, but you haven't said if there's any reason why you might not be able to rename one or both of your SD cards.
I don't think this is the case with camera SD cards. The default behavior when you format an SD card in-camera (which you do every time you use it) is to make it "Untitled". I have at least a dozen Macs kicking around and the cards show up as expected on all the ones I've tried. Anyway thank you.
Yeah it's my M4 Max Mac Studio on Sequoia and all the others are on older operating systems. My M1 is still on Ventura since I hate "upgrading" macos. It's doing this on the most recent OS which is why I'm surprised I can't find other people talking about it.
I don't know enough about the OS to know if this is how it's supposed to work or not but I haven't had this Mac Studio long enough for a single software update so I don't know if it's a bug or not.
Yeah, I rarely if ever connect any two volumes with the same name simultaneously, so I wouldn't even be able to say what the normal macOS behaviour is on any of my systems.
I am puzzled, since it seems that you just don’t want to try naming the SD card volumes. I have never found naming such cards via a Mac to present problems for a device, and it is easy enough to try.
Well, you're right. Cameras rename a formatted card "UNTITLED" even if you've renamed the card. And you should only reformat a card in a camera, not on the computer. Because, well, cameras are not too smart.
This little macro will prompt you for an SD card name if you mount one named UNTITLED. It also asks you for your password, since diskutil insists.
But, as you know, the renaming will only last until you reformat in the camera.
Now do a "Get Info" on those, in either the "Volumes" directory or from the Finder's sidebar, and disclose the "Name & Extension" section. What do you see?
When you mount a volume labelled "Untitled" you expect to see a volume called "Untitled" -- Finder jumps through hoops to make that happen, hiding what's actually going on at the filesystem level. Terminal is less polite, showing you what is rather than what you might expect.
You should be able to avoid that by using Finder instead:
tell application "Finder"
set i to 1
repeat while exists disk ("UNTITLED-" & i)
set i to i + 1
end repeat
set name of disk "UNTITLED" to ("UNTITLED-" & i)
end tell
...although you may still want to prompt for the disk name -- the obvious problem with the above is that if you have disks a, b:
You plug in a, which is renamed "UNTITLED-1"
You remove a
You plug in b, which is renamed "UNTITLED-1"
You plug in a
...and you now have two volumes named "UNTITLED-1" -- hardly an improvement!
@Undertaker01 -- if you do want to auto-rename you'll need to come up with a scheme that works for you. You may be limited to a DOS-compliant name by the disk's format. You may want the name to persist between formats so that "MYNAME" remains "MYNAME" every time you plug it into your Mac, until you next format it. And so on.
Or you may find it simpler to do the rename manually -- it's only a right-click on the volume in the sidebar, select "Rename", type a name and hit Return
Hmm, interesting. I have not found this to be the case but maybe it depends upon the camera technology (OS etc, what sort of “camera” the device is...) and I can only speak from my limited perspective. So anyway, to recap...
KM can look at the files too. How about keeping one (different!) file on each card permanently, and using a path condition to check for its presence?
Or... if the cards are not of identical size, perhaps that could be used to distinguish them.
Yeah, should have written, "Some cameras..." But once one of them does it, you have to account for it happening, I suppose. Not that it should.
The simple solution is just to manually rename the card when mounted. But my macro works as a gatekeeper, to remind you to do it. Keyboard Maestro has just the right triggers.
I wonder if, by concentrating on renaming “Untitled”, the topic has fallen from the start into the XY problem trap. Is the aim not to rename volumes, but rather to allow volumes to be distinguished? The point I tried to make is that naming is just one way to distinguish volumes.
In my last reply I suggested a couple of ways in which two SD cards might be distinguished, which is a more fundamental need than renaming volumes. If it is possible for a macro to distinguish between volumes, it can copy the volumes contents (photos) and so on as well as carry out any required renaming.
I suggested keeping a file on one of the SD card volumes as a marker of its identity (this could, for instance, be a hidden file called “.SDCARD1”) but a neater way might be to check the UUIDs for the volumes.
For volumes "Untitled" and "Untitled 1", the UUIDs could be found with the following commands in an execute a shell script action.
For "/Volumes/Untitled":
diskutil info /Volumes/Untitled | grep "Volume UUID"
For "/Volumes/Untitled 1":
diskutil info /Volumes/Untitled\1 | grep "Volume UUID"
But aren't these SD cards being reformatted by the camera? In which case the hidden file will be gone, the volume UUID changed. (And if we're not worried about reformatting, any renaming will persist across mounts.)
I don't have any SDs to check with, but I'm not sure there is a persistent ID you can use -- flash drives have USB IDs you can check against, but I think that for an SD any ID would be for the card reader and not each individual card.
I did try to check whether that was the case before replying but neither the OP nor a search on the word “format” indicated to me that that was known to be a factor here. Did I miss something? In my own experience, it is rare for a card to need reformatting.
I would be surprised but that is certainly possible. I am not able to check right now. Perhaps the OP would like to if the idea seems promising.
If the UUID is tied to the reader, then reformatting a card won’t remove it... but yes, there would need to be another way to distinguish the card. I have suggested two other possible ways, and I am sure there must be more.
SD cards should be reformatted by the camera not to the OS (so they work reliably in the camera), if you're going to reformat. But for my cameras that revert the card name to UNTITLED (like Olympus), I've found I just need to erase the files (in the camera), avoiding reformatting.
The SD Association provides a respected SD Memory Card Formatter for Windows/Mac as an alternative formatter but I've never used it myself. Their FAQ is interesting to read, BTW.
