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Vox Populi: Best practices for file naming
Merlin Mann | Oct 23 2006
If it wasn't apparent from my pathetic cry for help the other day, even I -- one of your more theoretically productive persons in North America -- struggle with what to call things. Tags, files, and -- dear Lord -- the innumerable assets associated with making web sites, graphics, audio, and video projects; it's all a hopeless jumble unless you have some kind of mature system in place for what you call your stuff and its various iterations. Of course, if you're like me -- and I hope that you are not -- you still have lots of things on your desktop with names like " For prior art, I still treasure this Jurassic thread on What Do I Know where people share their thoughts on this age-old problem, but, frankly I haven't seen many good resources out there on best practices for naming. Anyhow, during a recent MacBreak shoot, I noticed that Alex and his team seem to have a pretty fly system for naming the video files that eventually get turned into their big-time IPTV shows. Thus, I turned to Pixel Corps' Research Division Lead, Ben Durbin (co-star of Phone Guy #5) for insight and sane help. And, brother, did he ever give it to me (see below the cut for Ben's detailed awesomeness). But, just so I don't lose you, do give me your best tips in comments: What are your favorite current conventions for naming files? How does your team show iterations and versions? Do you rely more on Folder organization than file names in your work? How have Spotlight, Quicksilver, and the like changed the way you think about this stuff? Ben shares how Pixel Corps does it, video style:
Dang. Thanks for that, Ben! To repeat: What are your favorite current conventions for naming files? How does your team show iterations and versions? Do you rely more on Folder organization than file names in your work? How have Spotlight, Quicksilver, and the like changed the way you think about this stuff? 86 Comments
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![]() It took me quite a...Submitted by Sven Fechner (not verified) on October 23, 2006 - 8:17pm.
It took me quite a while to find my naming convention and eventually implement it in an consistent manner. I' am down to a punctation approach which people that know development languages such as Java (or even JavaScript for that matter) may regconise. clientname.project.artefact.version.fileextension which could look like this "John Doe.Strategy Map.Meeting Minutes 1110.v1.0.doc". Yes, I' am using spaces inbetween and love the ability of having quite long file names in Windows. If you adapt your view in the File Explorer accordingly and implement the naming convention consistenly it works perfect. However, there are some occassions where you need to put in a little brain, especially when it comes down to internal or administrative files you need to name. But it still works out. Needless to say that I agree with one of the commenters before - also delete or overwrite old version of documents - in 90% of all cases there is no need for old versions. I do so by overwriting and changing the version number. That helps when you ask yourself the question 'which version did I send to that guy? The filename is always indentical'. The date or age of the document is provided by Windows and you may change sorting in the File Explorer if you look for cronological order - no need to embed it into the filename. » POSTED IN:
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