Naming Conventions and Folder Structures

Introduction

Consistency is Key! It is important to develop, implement and consistently maintain your naming conventions, folder structures, and workflow. It’s essential that you develop a workflow that makes sense to you and is something that you can maintain over time. If your workflow is too complicated, then you’re not going to stick to it.

What Is A File Naming Convention?

A File Naming Convention (FNC) is a logical framework for naming your images in a way the plainly describes and identifies what they contain and how they pertain to other files. A good FNC identifies important distinctions and similarities between your files, through it’s implementation of easily readable key elements such as date, project or client name, location, format, or intended use. Using unique and standardised file names allows you to stay organised, maximise searchability, expedite retrievability, and easily and quickly determine the contents and relevance of a particular image.

Project Folders

Within your archive, every client, every job, every event, every location, every thing that you shoot should be separated into it’s own distinct project folder.

I choose to split my files (and hence archive and workflow) in two; one side is for my personal projects, the other for business (paying clients). It’s just something that helps me organise and narrow down – did I shoot it for myself, or did someone pay me to shoot it.

So within my Archive I have two folders: Personal, and Business. Within each of these are all my project folders. Some people like to further separate their project folders out by adding a layer where they are sorted by year, or year and then month, or state and city. The amount you organise down by subfolder all depends on your volume – you can scale up and down as needed.

Your project folders should be named as such:

[2023-05-15] John and Jane Smith Wedding, or [2021-05-01] Rushworth Easter Heritage Festival, or [2022-11-21] 12 Apostles Sunset.

It’s essential that you are consistent with your naming and formatting, include the date of the shoot and pertinent information (such as client name, or location) in plain human-readable names, and even a job reference number if you want to get fancy (could tie into your invoicing system). The reverse date in square brackets allows you to simply sort your folders by name and they will all drop into a very nice ascending or descending date order, while still maintaining a very logical and quickly readable date format (as opposed to say 20221121 – which at a quick glance can look like a big jumble of numbers). The easily human-readable names or locations allow for both plain text searching and quick identification when rapidly browsing a list of all your project folders.

While it’s certainly very useful, it’s also good practice to not be entirely dependent on tagging within software and such – software changes and updates, companies can go out of business, a piece of software that you use today could cease to function tomorrow (especially in today’s world of subscription models). That’s why it’s important to keep names human friendly and selections robust.

Within each of your project folders should be subfolders that arrange what the files within are for. I choose to go for, at a bare minimum, two folders labelled RAW and FINAL. All of my captured RAW files go into the RAW folder, and all of my fully edited and exported JPEGs go into FINAL (note that there’s a few steps in between here though). This is a bare minimum, often I’ll also have other folders called WEB (for low-resolution sRGB files for online use), WM (for watermarked versions), and PRINT (setup and laid out for printing).

RAW Files (Camera Capture)

There is some debate around renaming your RAW files, the main points being around uniqueness, filename collision avoidance, and searchability. It’s best practice that every RAW file you capture is uniquely identified, and unfortunately the automatically camera generated names don’t guarantee this - for example IMG_1234 (or DSC_1234) would repeat each time the camera passes 9999. In terms of filename collision avoidance in relation to multiple camera setups, I find it most helpful to modify each camera’s internal 3 character alphanumeric prefix to reflect the camera. E.g 5D4_XXXX.CR2 for a 5D4 and 06D_XXXX.CR2 for a 6D for example (or 810_XXXX.NEF for a D810, and D8E_XXXX.NEF for a D800E for instance). Multiple cams of the same model can be labelled A and B for instance (5DA and 5DB). Note that some cameras when set to capture in Adobe RGB colour space will sometimes force the first letter to be an underscore – adjust your naming prefix accordingly. A combination of approaches is best, you should modify your prefix in camera as above, but also upon file ingestion that you batch append your RAW filenames to include a date (more on this later). A combination of date, camera prefix and original image number creates enough uniqueness that unless you are shooting more than 10,000 images per day per camera then you’re never going to run into any collisions – every RAW file that you produce will be uniquely named.

For example: 20220705_5D4_4268.CR2 or 20230217_D8E_1249.NEF

Because RAW filenames need a higher level of uniqueness and brevity than the above project folder naming structure, making them quickly human-readable is less important, hence we omit the square brackets and hyphens from the date.

FINAL Files (Digital Client Supply)

In terms of final edited files for delivery, clients should never be exposed to the original imported image file naming scheme, only the derivatives, which are to be named with their own file naming scheme. You want to balance brevity, readability and completeness. I generally go for the same name as your project folder, plus the date, plus a unique numeric identification sequence.

Example: JoshEmilyWedding_20220613_001.jpeg

If you’re doing WEB or WM versions, add this on at the very end.

Example: JoshEmilyWedding_20220613_001_WEB.jpeg

Print File Naming

Naming files specifically for printing (and particularly for supply to a fine art printer such as ourselves) has some more specific considerations that are important to take into account. These are thoroughly covered in our article on Practical Tips For Print File Naming below.

Best Practices

Some general filename best practices are:

• Use reverse dates (ordered from the largest to smallest unit of time) such as YYYY-MM-DD, YY-MM-DD, YYYYMMDD, or YYMMDD - this is actually a defined international standard: ISO 8601.
• Use CamelCase (first letter of each word capitalised, no spaces)
  
• Between elements use underscores, not spaces.
• Within an element, use hyphens.
• Try and keep filenames shorter than 50 characters.
• Only use periods in the file extension (.jpeg).
• Only use alphanumeric characters (A-Z), numbers (0-9), hyphens and underscores.
• Don’t use any special characters or punctuation (e.g. “!#*^%@|’?/<>).
• It’s important to realise that when suffixing multiple files with numbers that in order for them to sort correctly you must use preceding 0s (e.g "01, 02, 10" will sort in order, whereas “1, 2, 10” will sort as “1, 10, 2”).
  

Resources

Harvard University have an excellent article on File Naming Conventions here and eXadox an excellent article on the reasons behind why we name things the way we do here.