What to Name a File

In the course of building a reference library, I am constantly faced with the dilemma of what and how to name an image file. What, as in what information I should provide, and how, as in how should I “encode” this information in terms of format.


In the past I would simply name the file exactly as it is. One of the great things about working with the Mac is its flexibility in naming files. Originally, we had up to 31 characters to work with as opposed to 8 on the PC. Then, when the Mac OS adopted the UNIX kernel and its file system was subsequently revamped, we had literally an unlimited amount of characters to use, something on the order of 256. This was wonderful.

But, the problem with naming a file with any pertinent information is the ease with which that information can be changed. I have therefore entirely abandoned the use of the filename to describe the contents of the image, relying on metadata to give a far more complete description.

This leaves us with the question of how to name the file. What is the actual name of the file?

Well, we need something that’s unique to each image, not too long, and that will not change. And this is simply the file’s creation date and time.

The date is handy enough, but the inclusion of the time stamp means that you can differentiate between 60 different images created each minute, and that should certainly be enough. The great thing is, this attribute can be applied in seconds to multiple files through Adobe Bridge’s batch renaming command.

I use the prefix “IMG_” and follow it by the year, month, day, hour, minute and second by setting the Bridge dialog as follows:

Adobe Bridge’s batch rename command allows you to create a unique filename for each image.

If I were to decide later on to change that prefix, I could easily do that to every image file in my library with a single command, and go get a cup of coffee while the computer does the processing for me.

One of the other great things about this approach is that it’s easy to spot “absolute duplicates” which are two copies of exactly the same file. They will appear with the same name, but Bridge will resolve them by appending a version number, such as (1).