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Date-first file naming: what it fixed, what it did not, and the two things I got wrong
Year, month, day, then a short description. I converted eight years of files. Honest account.
Fixed
- Sorting by name is now sorting by time everywhere: any file manager, a phone, a network share, inside a zip, in software with no concept of dates.
- Copied files stopped lying. Modification dates change on copy, move and restore; a date in the name does not.
- Scanned paper, which has no useful metadata at all. Biggest win by far.
- Two invoices from the same supplier stopped colliding.
Did not fix
- Finding something when you do not know roughly when it was. That is search, and naming does nothing for it.
- Anything shared. Nobody else adopts it.
- Photos, already handled by anything reading embedded metadata.
Two mistakes
- I used two-digit years to keep names short. Use four. It sorts the same and reads unambiguously in five years.
- Do not convert the back catalogue. A weekend of work and I have opened almost none of them since. Start from today.
@iso_or_nothing · 3w ago
Use hyphens rather than a run of digits: written that way it is recognised as a date by a lot of software, so it parses correctly when you import the folder somewhere. Eight bare digits is a number and things guess, silently.
And pad the single digits, or the sort breaks the first time the folder reaches October.
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