The World’s Best File Naming System

hi I'm Michael Greco I'm a professional photographer in Los Angeles California I've been shooting pictures of professionals movie stars and models for over 20 years during that time I've had to learn and invent ways to store retrieve and archive my work using different hard drives flash drives memory cards and solid-state drives this is one of the short videos I made for how to archive calm that will help show some of the ways you can increase your workflow and make your storage solutions work for you today we are discussing how I label files and hard drives for better identification we've all experienced the sudden shock of not being able to remember a file name or what a particular hard drive was used for when this happens we always wish we had done a better job at labeling and organizing our work and our hard drives I believe that labeling files and hard drives correctly is probably the most important thing you can do with the data you possess you got to find it let's take a brief look at the way I label my files some files like Word and Excel allow you to add information to the file via metadata which is really extra data like date/time created by all of that Photoshop files allow you to do the same thing when you use metadata it will help you better understand what the file was used for but you must first find the file to get to the metadata I believe the file name is the most important thing you need to find the file though the four main things I always occlude when I label my files are the file date at the beginning of each name I do this in reverse order so it's the year month and day like 2014 Oh 504 so that the dates file in chronological order the file name since I'm a portrait photographer I use things like last name first name like Martin underscore Steve for the subject name the subject thing needs to be what's appropriate for you though you can come up with your own way of identifying your jobs maybe it's by the client maybe it's by what you're shooting that day then I add the creator's initials in the third section of the name for Michael Greco photography I use MGP if someone else in my office is shot something I'd use their initials that way we know who created the file then lastly in position number four since there are multiple photographs or multiple video clips or audio clips I use the number that the camera or the digital recorder assigned to the file each frame has a unique number at the end and it's always a four-digit number like Oh 437 this system can be used for video files documents photos music any type of file now let's look at the way I label my hard drives there are only a few things to worry about here the main one is to name what the drive is like archive Drive or archive then I like to add the number of the drive because the files fall into chronological order we stack the images on the drive in chronological order when we need another drive we just add it so the drives are now numbered sequentially the first drive is a 1 the next one is o2 the next drive is o3 then because I don't record things to just one drive I record them to at least two if not three we use a letter so my archive drives might be named archive underscore oh one a archive underscore Oh to be that way the number tells you what number the drive is in the order and the a and the B tell you what set they're part of when we need more space we just add two new drives with a new number and we never add one drive we always add at least two because I'm always duplicating my data I always want to make sure I have a backup you may have noticed that I used an underscore in my file labeling system when you use underscores between each word your files can be read by 98% of all the computers used today spaces Slash's pound signs they're not readable when you use the same naming layout for all your work you will find it makes finding your files and drives much easier for photographers I also always archive my files in Adobe DNG you want to save the original raw shot but instead of saving ten different types of raw because you've used a bunch of cameras over the year I convert everything to the Adobe Digital negative format and that way I have one Universal format to archive E&G is a universal format that Adobe says they will always maintain and it also keeps you from having unreadable files in the future camera RAW files that have gotten so old that the softwares are not able to read them down the road last but not least I like to take a screenshot of what's on the hard drive so that there is a way to identify the material on the drive later I file all of these drive shots in a single folder on my office computer or on my network server this way I can find what I'm looking for much easier and quicker there are of course software's to find your work but this is a cheap and easy solution to do it you can also set up an Excel spreadsheet you can use different cataloging software's but if you want to do something just really really easy it's so easy to just take a screenshot of what's on the hard drive once you get the hang of using these methods labeling your files and hard drives will become easier and your files will always be there for you when you need them I hope this video has helped you better understand some of the benefits of using a labeling system instead of trusting your files and hard drives to memory that's a bad idea thanks for taking the time to watch and look for more of my videos on how to store use and archive your files archive calm

Channel: How To Archive

Views: 536,425

Keywords: File Naming, digital cold storage, data archiving, photography, Computer File, File Naming System, how to archive, ProStorage, How-to (Website Category)

Id: 1lutNrHI_ac

Length: 6min 51sec (411 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 10 2014