File Naming and Organizing

[Morty]

For those with webpages, sharing files, loading them on the web, or just naming files on your computer for your own personal use, here's a few things to keep in mind and try and make a habit of doing. It will help you locate files faster when searching, in addition, it will minimize issues when trying to link to them or load them on the web.

Webspace file names and your PC are two different worlds.

Files/webpages/locations/etc in the webworld are very anal.

File names and folders are always best all in lowercase, not necessary, but always best because "calling" a file must be exact and they are case sensitive. When things goof or whatever, things always goof to pure lowercase, never a mix, never all caps. Always fails to pure lowercase. Happens occasionally when downloading for backups, or when there is a crash and things are rebuilt via a program reloading backups. They sometimes goof and make everything lowercase.

2nd. Never have spaces in a file name. Works for Windows, screws with everything else in the computer world. If you want to put "spaces" between your words, I always use underscores.

Underscores_help_with_reading_words_better_than_a_ dash_does. You can use dashes-between-your-words, but I prefer underscores as a personal preference. I also use underscores to break apart the key parts of a filename.

For example, if I'm naming a photo. 2007-06-29_mortys-vacation.jpg

Thing to note in addition to the way I named that with the date, you want to ALWAYS put the year first for organizational purposes. Because if you were to put january-27-2007, it would be listed BEFORE a file named april-6-1975. Same thing if I did 01-24-2007 and a file named 05-06-1975.

And if you are bothering with dates in a filename, always put the date before the description. Year/Month/Day. 2007-06-29_irondog-is-gay.jpg

Also a keypoint, always make years with 4 digits, days with 2 digits, same with months.

YYYY-MM-DD

The things you should never ever use in filenames are:
`~!@#$%^&*()+='";:/?.>,< Any symbols other than the underscore _ and the dash -
. periods or dots .
CapItaL LetTerS
And never have spaces in filenames.

I'm sure there are a few other things I'm forgetting, but this is the basics.

I recommend getting in the habit of labeling your PC files like this so that when the time comes you want to share a file, there are no issues. And once it becomes habit, its no biggie to do. Plus it helps if you can't remember the name of a file at all, but you do remember it was sometime in 2006 you made it. Sure its a shitload of files labeled with the 2006, but it sure beats digging through ALL OF YOUR files on your PC. Just do a file search for 2006, and your choices are less. Another thing, if you remember it was towards the earlier part of the year in 2006, you can do a search for 2006-0 At least this way you won't be digging through the 10th, 11th, and 12th month which would be labeled 2006-10 or -11 or -12

Just thought I'd share this. Might make some people's PC worlds a little less frustrating.

[WillRiker]

Makes sense now that you put it all that way. I tend to capitalise the first words of all my files which is obviously causing some issues when uploading them.

All makes sense now though..