Name Folders to Organize Your Images

You have many digital-shoebox applications to choose from to help you organize your photos. Or, you could simply use the built-in tools that come with your operating system.

 

Of all the places I've been the most amazing one I've seen remains my grandfather's basement. It was organized. He had, perhaps, an unfair advantage over the rest of us. As a pharmacist in the days when all pills were white, being disorganized could have been fatal.

 

The discipline of being organized was part of his daily routine. But he also enjoyed the advantage of organizing things, which is simply being able to find just what you need without the frustration of looking for it. The screws were on these shelves, the nails there, the adhesives right here, the rubber bands (sorted by size) over there, and on and on. His basement was as neatly organized as Noah's ark. Fortunately, he passed that gene on to me, so when I started collecting digital images, I quickly established a scheme so that I'd never have to look for them or remember where they were on my Portfolio Website.

 

This was long before asset-management programs such as Adobe Photoshop Album (Windows), Canto Cumulus (Mac/Win), Extensis Portfolio (Mac/Win), iPhoto (Mac), iView Media Pro (Mac/Win), Kodak Easy Share (Mac/Win), Picasa (Windows), QPict (Mac), and others were available. I had to rely on the only thing available: the file system.

 

Filenames

 When I was the computer guy at the office, I used to have a standing offer of US$100 to anyone whose problem could not be resolved by a clear understanding of the four parts of a filename. In the days of MS-DOS business systems, I never had to pay out.

 

Here are the four parts of a filename:

 

· The volume name (e.g., C:\ or Macintosh HD)

· The directory and subdirectories, if any (e.g., DOS\ or Documents

· The root name (e.g., AUTOEXEC or Read Me)

· The extension (e.g., .BAT or .txt)

 

As you can see from the examples, this tends to be true for all operating systems. In

Windows, you might see C:\DOS\AUTOEXEC.BAT, and on the Mac you might see Macintosh

HD: Documents: Read Me.txt, but all four parts are there in each filename.

 

Each part does a different job:

 

Volume name

Tells us where the file can be found. The volume can be the internal hard drive (as in our previous example), an external storage device, a CD, or a floppy.

 

Directory and subdirectories

Together with the volume, these give us the pathname of the file. The pathname in our example is C:\DOS\ or Macintosh HD: Documents

Root name

Pretty much what we call a filename, period, it’s the basic name of the file. Without the root name, we don't have anything.

 

Source: O’Reilley | Online Portfolio Website