File Naming Conventions
Image galleries, previews, and browse capabilities make it easier to see what documents you have collected, but what happens if you don’t have them? Or someone else wants to use what you’ve created? Having good file naming conventions helps you stay organized and understand what you gathered no matter what the context.
Goals:
- Keep things that go together… together.
- Decide on an organizing scheme and stick with it.
- Make sure that your organizing scheme is apparent to someone that doesn’t know you. (This doesn’t mean that the outside person knows the contents of the file but that he or she understands why you put things together in the way you did.)
Effective folder organization — examples:
- By event (“Field Recordings,” “Video Interviews,” “Day of the Dead Ceremonies – Audio,” etc.)
- By person, location, or project facet (“Jane Doe materials,” “Main Building sounds,” “Mood board images”)
- Whatever is effective for you, as long as someone else understands it!
Effective file organization — examples:
- By prefix, then part (recordings_mainbuilding_shouting.wav, interviews_doe-jane_part1.mov)
- Grouping together, then by suffix (recordings_mainbuilding_shouting.wav, recordings_mainbuilding_shouting-transcription.txt).
- Whatever is effective for you, as long as someone else understands it!
A note on dates: date may seem tempting for an organizing structure, especially for photos, because most cameras name files by their date stamps. This is useful to understand what was captured before what, though perhaps not more. Because the project timelines are compressed, dates will be very granular, and we don’t recommend organizing your files or folders by date. You may not find what you are looking for if you organize by date.
The takeaway: don’t let this worry you too much! Stay as organized as you can and you’ll save a lot of time.