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Use Naming Conventions to Organize Your Data

By on November 10, 2008 (2 Comments)

Here you may see the naming conventions I use for my files, this is here just as a guide to get you started on your own system. I set many of these conventions many years ago, but they work. Experience has given me newer ideas, some of which I am currently using.

This guide is included as part of the Windows Guides File Organization series. Please visit the main page if you would like to learn why this guide may be useful.

Photo Files

I archive my photos in the following way: Photo > %Year% > %Date%&Title
An interpretation of the above is displayed in the following screenshot:

Yearly Archives

organize your files 01 Use Naming Conventions to Organize Your Data

Individual Events

organize your files 02 Use Naming Conventions to Organize Your Data

Photos in Chronological Order

organize your files 03 Use Naming Conventions to Organize Your Data

As you can see, I have my Photos folder, the Year (2008), and the

Date and Title. This helps me organize my photos without renaming any pictures that come from the camera. This way the photos stay in chronological order, without sorting by date.

Documents

Even though you can sort files by date in all popular OSs, I still append a date to the front of a file. This helps me with versioning and I usually remember when I wrote something, and not what I called it.

Document Folders in Chronological Order

organize your files 04 Use Naming Conventions to Organize Your Data

Documents in Chronological Order

organize your files 05 Use Naming Conventions to Organize Your Data

Music

Everyone names their music differently, this is my way (but I’m not an MP3 tag person, so I would probably use this for inspiration and not instruction.)

The following screenshot shows my basic structure: Music > %genre% > %album_title%

Music by Genre

organize your files 06 Use Naming Conventions to Organize Your Data

Albums within Hip Hop

organize your files 07 Use Naming Conventions to Organize Your Data

All individual songs that I buy separately go into the genre folder, along with any albums that are in their own folders. Tags essentially do the same thing, but when you have over 100 albums (or 1000s as may be the case), it helps to do some organization within your file structure.

What organization techniques do you use? If you don’t have a system, make one today!

Use Naming Conventions to Organize Your Data

About Rich

Rich is the owner and creator of Windows Guides; he spends his time breaking things on his PC so he can write how-to guides to fix the problems he creates.

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Comments

  • Windows Guides File Organizati

    [...] Use Naming Conventions to Organize Your Data [...]

  • Karinaduarte17

    perfect! I did the same!!
    I order the music (all albums) by artist (easy way to find using only a letter)
    the photos, I give them a name (of the person or place) but always ordered by date.
    my problems is with files, works, asignaments, etc. (files from the university ordered by semester)


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