3 Tips To Improve Your File Management

I spent the day finalizing the folder structure and naming conventions. Admittedly at some point it was driving me crazy and I just started making decisions. As mentioned before, systems exist to support you, so don’t make it more complicated than it is.

It doesn’t make sense to make it so complicated for us because every “project” is super small. A stream or a graphic only consists of so many files, so creating a maze of folders is not beneficial.

It becomes beneficial when you have a clear outlined deliverable, that consists of many files, where you have multiple stages and steps that are always the same.

So in our case for the video projects, we have in theory 3 folders: raw, output and thumbnail. Within the folders we name the files in the following way: (project acronym)(file name)(version). An example is the project “4 Tips To Reduce Screen Time”, we named the files: RST_English_Reels_01.

Here are some tips to help you with your file management:

• Output files should follow same name as the project file. This makes it easy to find them back.

• Never use the words “final” or “new”. Because changes can always come.

• Every time you make a big change, version up your files. This way you can always rollback.