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Concatenation got your tongue?

July 21, 2008 A couple of days ago I began a rant about file naming. This is a continuation of that rant.

Yesterdayday I shot 463 photos of a bicycle race in my town. It was a good day for bicycle race photography. In the regular course of business, I shoot a lot of photos. Last Friday afternoon I shot 63 photographs for a catalog of paintings. These paintings are as large as nine feet by three, and as small as three feet square. I named the photos after the names of the paintings, and added the artist’s name to each one.

I do this so much that I have developed a discipline that is pretty close to fool-proof. I use simple words. I never abbreviate (except for common abbreviations like St., Blvd., Ave.). I never use cute words or nicknames. And, I put spaces between the words.

Now, some of you Windows brethren are thinking “But Windows requires you to concatenate words in filenames.” NONSENSE!! Just try it! You can type over 1,000 characters in a file name in Windows, and word spaces are perfectly legal. It’s the Macintosh operating system (based on UNIX) that is the laggard here. Hell’s bells... I tested this the other day, and I discovered that I could write a whole paragraph as a filename on a Windows machine (MS Word still inflicts unnecessary filename limitations on both Mac and Windows).

And, to test this on the Mac, I just named a folder “We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and out posterity, do ordain and establish this Co”.

Oh, rats! I couldn’t use the entire preamble to the Constitution as a folder name.

So, when you’re saving that customer project, a library of photos, illustrations, color separations, plate files or whatever it is you’re about to save... wouldn’t it be easier to name it with ITS NAME than some stupid concatenation of job ticket number, and some made-up abbreviation that you’ll never remember when you’re tearing your hair out trying to find the file three years from now?

How about Job number, customer name, date, and job description in complete words separated by word spaces?

Which makes more sense?

Prtwkpst08fnl.indd

or

Printing Week Poster 2008 final.indd

I promise that two months (or two hours) from now you will never remember how you abbreviated Prtwkpst08fnl. It’s just impossible. So, give yourself a break and introduce words and spaces to your file names.

Almost every day I search for files, photos, illustrations and projects that I did a few months or a few years ago. My searches are usually uneventful – and successful. When I need to search for an Illustration of the American Flag, I search for “American Flag” and – I find it! What a concept!

And, be careful not to be too generic! If bicycle race is good, how about adding the date of the bicycle race? It won’t be the last bicycle race in history, and it will make it a hell of a lot easier to identify one year’s bicycle race from another when you are searching for photos in 2011.

I rest my case.

Posted by Brian Lawler on July 21, 2008 | Comments (8)