So the fact that the camera does not name the "remoted" file, the camera file counter likely remains fixed.
Thanks for the description, that clears it up a lot.
That seems to agree with your CHDK operation description. Hence a pileup of RAW files with the same number on the SD card. CHDK does not overwrite a existing file with the same name, instead it adds it to the SD card folder.
I don't understand this. If CHDK sees the same number, the file will have identical names and be overwritten. AFAIK you can't have multiple files with the same name in the same directory in FAT unless the filesystem is badly damaged. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something.
It's possible for the listing windows shows over USB to have duplicate names (I've seen this happen when you mix prefix/extension combos the firmware doesn't expect), but the actual directory on the card shouldn't be able to do this.
It seems to me the Canon firmware might be confused if there are only raws with no associated jpeg. In this case, the actual numbers on the card could be correct.
Can you look in the CHDK file browser and see what it shows in this situation ? Or examine the card in a card reader ?
One option a developer may consider is when CHDK detects RemoteCapture,
CHDK doesn't currently know how to detect RemoteCapture. We could probably detect if the file number incremented between shots, but it's not clear what to do then. If we add to the current file counter value, then things will get confused when the Canon counter starts counting again. We could add an option to the raw settings to use a completely different counting scheme I guess.
I wouldn't want CHDK to figure out the number from files on the card (at least not by default), because it could be quite slow, and there are already issues due to having too many files handles open at startup. There's also diversity in the possible location and naming.
Over the next several days I will try your suggestion of PTP on another computer and might have some questions later, for I which I'd start a new thread. You seem very knowledgeable ... I noticed a C code snippet in a reply ... are you one of the developers?
Yes, I am one of the chdk developers and the developer of the chdkptp client.
Note that although it isn't implemented yet, there has been talk about sending images directly over the PTP extension without writing to the card, see
http://chdk.setepontos.com/index.php?topic=4338.msg88931#msg88931