Irreal

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.

I’ve written before about Karl Voit (1, 2, 3) and his quest to record and digitize every aspect of his life. His Memacs system, which collects data from his email, phone, social media and other sources, is an excellent example of that quest. His latest post is about the lessons he learned digitizing all his papers and books.

Voit is an Open Source advocate so he turned first to open solutions for his scanning and OCS needs. Unfortunately, none of the tools were up to his specifications. After looking at—and even trying—different hardware, he settled on the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500¹. I have the same scanner and agree with Voit that it’s a clear winner. When I used a flatbed scanner, the process was so inconvenient that I let my scanning pile up and would have to spend an hour or more scanning the accumulated documents. The ScanSnap is small enough to keep on my desk, is always ready, and takes no time at all to scan and run OCR on a document.

So far, Voit has scanned over 40,000 pages. That includes books, from which he removed the spines. When he was done, he threw away all the paper and books. Now everything is digitized and instantly searchable—a clear win, especially for someone like Voit who is dedicated to having the events in his life instantly retrievable.

If you’ve thought about getting that pile of old papers under control, take a look at Voit’s post. It may provide the inspiration you need to get started. As for me, all new paper coming into the house is scanned and shredded. I’m still working on the backlog and will probably never take my books apart to scan.

UPDATE: splines → spines