I am, I must admit, fascinated by Karl Voit’s work in capturing, storing, and indexing the digital files that record his life. I’ve covered some aspects of this before and will doubtless cover other aspects that I find interesting.
Today, I want to talk about a post in which he describes his digital workflow. The post is nominally about how he processes and stores digital photos but many of the processes hold for any type of file.
One of the most important and interesting things—and in some sense most trivial—is his naming convention for files. Here’s an example: 2014-05-09T22.19.58 Susan presenting her new shoes -- family clothing.jpg. Each file name begins with a date/time stamp. That’s important for Voit because he ties all his files together into his agenda so he can pull up everything relevant to a particular day in his life. It’s also important, as he explains, because file metadata is often changed by utilities that work on the files. By putting the date/time stamp in the file name, he assures that it changes only if he changes it explicitly.
After the date/time stamp, there’s a brief description of the file; it’s what most of us would use for the entire file name. That’s followed by “ -- ” which marks the beginning of the tags. This is the most interesting part of his convention. It allows him to add tags to his files, which he can use for searches. He can, for example, call up all files with the “clothing” tag and get the example file above as one of them. Again, because the tags are part of the file name they don’t get lost when files are moved or stored on different media or a different operating system.
The rest of Voit’s post describes his folder structure and the scripts that he uses to help with processing his photos and dealing with naming them. Although I found his naming convention the most interesting part of the post, the whole thing is worthwhile. Read it. You may get some useful ideas.