My Digital Photo Organization: Principle 2 – Naming Files

This post is part of a series I am writing on my digital photo/file organization, based on a presentation I recently presented.  I first gave an overview of the talk. I then shared information on taking the first step in photo organization by gathering all files in one place. Here, I will talk about how I name files.

After gathering photos, the next step is to consider how you name your files. When I do it, I choose to do it so that my computer does some organization work on my behalf. When naming my files, I follow suggestions offered by The Family Curator. Specifically, I:

• avoid using special characters –  this means I do not use symbols. A list of special characters and reasons for not using them can be found at https://www.mtu.edu/umc/services/digital/writing/characters-avoid/.
• keep my file names as short as I can – I can do this by not being overly descriptive in the file name. I save descriptions for metadata, which I will talk about in a future blog post. Short can be relative, but I am always careful not to make it too long. I also use sequential ordering rather than create specific file names if I have photos all from one event. For example, if I take 50 pictures at a wedding, they will get named something like “2019-06-01_nancy-wedding-01.jpg”, “2019-06-01_nancy-wedding-02.jpg” etc. Because software programs make it easy to do this in seconds, sequential file naming saves time! Again, the details go in the metadata, not the file name.
• begin my file names with a date  – this is so that the computer does the sort for me. I think in chronological terms, so this is ideal as when my files are in a directory, I can let the computer sort them in chronological order since the year comes first, then the month, then the day. The format to use is YYYY-MM-DD

One challenge I have encountered is what to do when I do not have an exact date for a photo. In the present day, the photos we take with our cell phones all have the exact date and time stamp, so those are easy. But, we may not have this benefit for older photos that we may have scanned in, or obtained some other way. In these cases, I still use the date format, but I use fill-in characters to approximate.

• If I do not know the year, I put as many digits as I can and then use an “x” for the place in the year I do not know. If I have a photo that I can be pretty sure was taken in the 1950s, I will begin the file name with “195x”.  If I only know the century, I could begin the file name with “19xx”.
• If I do not know the month, I put “00”. So, if I have a photo I know was taken in 1952 but do not know anything else, the filename begins with “1952-00”.
• Let’s say I know the year, the month, but not the day? In that case, I will have a format like “1952-05-00”.

In addition to using this naming convention, if I do not know the exact date, I also make a note in the descriptive metadata of the image. By following these practices, I can easily sort my photos chronologically. If the date is approximate, then the sort still works – it just puts the approximate date photos listed before the exact date photos.

Following these practices does wonders for helping me stay organized and keeping my files tidy!