The World’s Best File Naming System

I love that there is a whole YouTube channel around this concept.

At last, someone who understands that YYYYMMDD is the ONLY correct way to put dates on filenames. It always sorts properly no matter the operating system.

A Linux technician told me (around 10 years ago) to only use underscores when naming my files. Good to see that advice is being passed on in this video too. It's kinda crazy that simple stuff, like naming conventions, is so infrequently taught.

I’ve been using essentially this system since working on a national advertising campaign circa 1989 where I HAD to get serious — absolutely rock solid advice! I don’t understand how anyone could give this advice a thumbs down.!

Clever as hell. A bunch of good ideas from a professional.

Finally! Someone else understand the whole yyyymmdd file naming system. I tried explaining this to a few friends (designers) and they couldn’t understand it at all. I typically do this for folders instead of the files themselves since I use a program to lock files to folders, but I love this technique. I just don’t understand why photographers are the only ones who do this...

That date format is ISO 8601. If you use dashes instead of underscores, it works better with searches, as does all lowercase in file names.

Learning about why to use an underscore was worth watching this video. The rest of the info was not only doable but also super easy to incorporate. Thanks!!

Such a great video !! the final touch would be adding a QR code (once you are printing those labels to stick on drives) that leads directly to the screenshots !

This is what I’ve been waiting for ... a logical method of storing/filing ....l thanks 🙏

For images I use YYYYMMDD-9999 in the beginning of the file name, where 9999 is a sequence number, followed by info of the file in a same way as mentioned in the video. This way, the image file has a ‘unique’ label independent of the text in the file name. This allows for publishing the image file only by it’s unique label and keeping track in my archive. For other documents types I use YYYYMMDD at the end.

Thank you Fred Armisen! Didn't know you had such practical skills!

I take a snapshot of the files on the hard drive, using an old polaroid ... then scan the polaroid and add it to the drive. Then I snapshot the archive with the polaroid I just archived, for archival purposes. Duplication is important. Most of my working set are on SD cards carefully arranged around my home, such as behind the fridge or down the back of the sofa.... however, I also maintain duplicates - probably on that flash drive I lent to Peters' moms new BF. Typically I try to put the duplicates on the same media they're duplicating... which is handy because then you can't lose 'em and you know what they go with. My file naming system is a little more advanced than the one in the video. I mostly shoot weddings and portraits... so I first sort them into 'bangable' and 'not bangable' on a shot by shot basis. The 'not bangable' simply aggregate in that folder ... however, the bangable ones get further refined by hair colour or most attractive physical feature. Thus when a portrait client walks in for copies, I know exactly where to find them. Getting copies for weddings usually involves gathering a little more information : "Mr. and Mrs Noakes? June 2013? ... Oh, wait, wasn't she the short brunette with the ridiculous ass? ... GOT IT !" By not sorting the uglies you save a lot of time - besides, nobody ever wants late copies of those anyway. Oh, and finally ALWAYS keep the originals archived separately from the photoshop retouches ... nobody want's to find a picture of their mother-in-law being banged by an octopus, or their wife and niece in a three-way with a gorilla ... ... I'm not making THAT mistake again.

I’m SOOO Excited I found this video!! Starting my first larger project and I knew I wanted awesome organization from the get go. But didn’t know what strategy to use. THANK YOU!!!

Very good tip that will help me re-think my filing system. I used to only name my folders in this way. Now I will also rename my actual files

ive been using this method for a few years now never looked back-and recommend it to all!

What about "dashes" vs "underscore"? I've read an article stating that dashes are better for web indexing and search engines. Personally I prefer dashes, because it allows to "alt" (on Mac) or "ctrl" (on PC) + shift + arrow keys quickly move and erase or relabel parts of a file name. With underscores this doesn't work, because the whole name will be interpreted as one string (both mac and pc).

I've used the YYYYMMDD file naming since the 1990s. I doubt that many of you have done much or had files from before the turn of the century. I sometimes question whether the first two YYs are necessary, but for safety and consistency I still use all four.

Thanks for that Mike. A suggestion to take your screenshot system further would be to run them through an ocr application to convert them all to searchable pdfs. That way you can just search that folder to find things quickly instead of having to look at each image individually 😀👍👌

I've been doing very similar for a long time. It truly is the best system. Why would anyone not use YYYYMMDD at the beginning of their filenames? It's so logical and simple.