Organising files
Every file gets named once and searched for dozens of times. Optimise for the searches.
2026-07-31 sorts chronologically as text, groups by year and month for free, and is unambiguous in every locale. 31-7-26, July 31, and Jul31 do none of that.
Lead with it for anything periodic: 2026-07-31 board minutes.pdf.
Name for your future search, which will be one or two remembered words. invoice, contract, mockup, client names, project names. The test: six months from now, what will you type? Put those words in the name.
Camera and scanner names (IMG_4021, Scan0007) fail this test totally — they contain nothing you would ever search.
-v1 -v2 -v3 beats final, FINAL, final-final, FINAL-USE-THIS. Everyone has the folder proving why. If a file is genuinely final, it is the one *without* a suffix, and the versions carry numbers.
Letters, numbers, hyphens, spaces. Avoid / (impossible), : (translates strangely from old Mac conventions), and leading dots (hides the file). Trailing spaces and dots upset cloud sync. Case is preserved but not distinguished on default APFS, so never rely on Report.pdf versus report.pdf being different files.
Deep folder trees rot; a good name works from any folder. 2026-03 acme proposal v2.pdf is findable dumped in a heap. proposal.pdf needs its exact folder path remembered forever.
Renaming a thousand old files is not worth an afternoon; adopt the convention today and let search carry the past. Batch rename (select → right-click → Rename) fixes the worst offenders — a folder of IMG_ files gains dates in seconds.
ISO: YYYY-MM-DD. It sorts correctly as text and is unambiguous everywhere.
Spaces are fine on macOS and most tools; the shell just needs quoting. Underscores only matter for web publishing and code.
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