Naming files so you can find them in two years

Every project accumulates files named by whoever last touched them. Two years later somebody asks whether the photograph on page four is licensed, and the answer takes an afternoon.

Why the obvious names fail

hero-final-v3-FINAL.jpg records the history of one person's afternoon and nothing else. It does not say what the picture is, where it came from, or what it is licensed for.

valley-fog.jpg is better and still fails, because there were four valley fog images considered and this is one of them, and nothing says which.

The identifier that does not change

Every image here has a thirty-two character asset id. It is in the file metadata, on the purchase receipt, and in the page source.

Titles change. Slugs change. Filenames get renamed by contractors, by asset managers and by whoever exported the final version. The asset id does not, and it is the only thing that ties a picture in a layout to a licence in a receipt.

A naming pattern that works

a3f19c2b4d5e...-valley-fog-hero.jpg

Asset id first, then something human. The id makes it findable and unambiguous; the words make it browsable.

It looks ugly in a folder listing and that is the entire cost.

A three-column log

A spreadsheet is enough. Asset id, order id, where it was used.

That is the whole compliance system. When a client, printer or legal review asks whether an image is cleared, you answer immediately instead of reconstructing it from email.

On a project with forty licensed images the difference is a working day, and it is a working day that arrives at the worst possible moment, because rights questions always come up during a deadline.

Let the metadata do the work

The IPTC fields in a delivered file carry the title, description, keywords and asset id. Most layout applications read them; most asset managers index them.

If you use a digital asset manager, ingesting those fields means the log builds itself and you never think about this again.

Originals and derivatives

Keep them apart, and never edit an original in place.

project/images/originals/   as downloaded, untouched
project/images/working/     layered files
project/images/export/      derived, web and print

Re-downloading is only possible inside a short window. An original you deleted is an original you will be writing an email about.