A Few Thoughts on Filenames…

George Jardine

File names are hard.

Nailing down a coherent and consistent file naming strategy for my own library took some time. Let alone for my clients. And the thread goes way back. Back to before we even starting thinking about how to support folder structures and manipulate file names in Lightroom.

I think a lot of the reason why photographers have such a hard time with file names in general, goes all the way back to the innovation of “files and folders” in early desktop computer user interfaces. As much of an innovation as the graphical display of files and folders was, the one fatal flaw was that it reinforced a very distinct real-world behavior that eventually conspired to actually make finding a specific thing in the computer more difficult.