File Naming 101

Photographers create and name hundreds or thousands of files for each shoot, and how you name those files — just like how you name your kids — can drastically affect the way they’re treated throughout life.  Do yourself and your images a favor, and name them properly before sending them out into the big, scary world.  Following the below guidelines will help ensure your filenames do not confuse any of the technology out there, and we recommend these guidelines no matter what lab, hosting site, or other services you use.

1. Restrict your use of characters.  Many systems (the web especially) do not support the use of certain characters or reserve them for special purposes, so it is important that you use only the following set of alphanumeric characters within your file names: 

• Acceptable characters:
  • The letters A-Z (both upper and lowercase)
  • The digits 0-9
  • Dashes (“-”) and underscores (“_”)
• Characters to avoid:
  • Spaces – These are a big no-no, but are so tempting to use.  Try dashes and underscores in place of spaces in your file names.
  • Periods – Files should have only one period within them, and that’s the one that comes before the file extension (ex: “filename.jpg”).
  • &,@,#,$,*,’, ! and all other “fancy” characters – Just stick to the basics.

2. Keep file names short. We know this is going to come as a blow to some people, but long file names can cause trouble.  Long names will often be truncated by hosting sites as well as by lab software when creating the back-printing on your prints.  We recommend keeping file names under 15 characters in length.

If you’re the type who likes to include every bit of detail in your file names (date, time, lens, subject, location, etc.), you should consider seriously shortening your names.  One thing to keep in mind is that much of this info is already embedded into each file by the camera.  If you open up an image’s properties, you’ll be able to see the time, camera, aperture, and often much more information.  Another alternative to long file names is tagging which lets you embed whatever information you want into your files without affecting the file name.

3. Use leading zeros.  Numbering your files can be deceptively tricky.  When numbers within file names contain varying amounts of digits, they will often appear to be sorted correctly within Windows or Mac OS, but less-forgiving computer systems will scramble them.  This is very often the case with online hosting sites.

To ensure your files always display in the desired sequence, you need to add what are called “leading zeros.”  Simply pad the beginning of each number with zeros so they all contain the same number of digits.  Here’s an example:

Avoid this:	Use this:
1.jpg	001.jpg
2.jpg	002.jpg
3.jpg	003.jpg
4.jpg	004.jpg
5.jpg	005.jpg
…	…
498.jpg	498.jpg
499.jpg	499.jpg
500.jpg	500.jpg

 

Now go forth and name your files well.  They’ll thank you for making their lives easier, and so will your lab and hosting site.  Do you have another tip for naming files?  Tell us about it in the comments section below.

Shameless Plug: If you’d rather not worry about things like this, PWD Labs offers a complete array of post-event image services which can remove the post-production burden from you, the photographer.  Just send us your out-of-camera images, we’ll edit and process them to your standards, and we’ll return the final images to you.  And, of course, we’ll name the files according to the above guidelines.