Tips for Naming Files on Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here's some tips for naming files on your Mac. 

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So I'm often asked for advice on naming files on your Mac. After all to get back to a file you usually need to look through a long list of file names, figure out which one it is, and then you can preview or open it. So having a good system for naming your files can be very important.

Let's say you create a new file and it's time to save it for the first time. The sky is the limit for what you could really name the file. You have very few restrictions on characters or how long it can be. But it is important to have a balance between the length and how descriptive the name is. After all you can name a file something really long like this. So you can see this is a nice long name. There's probably no doubt once you find this file what it is. You may even remember naming it this and everything. But if you save it and then look at it in the Finder it is probably going to be truncated. There's not going to be enough room unless you really stretch the column or have lots of space in your Finder window. So it is going to be difficult to see all of that. All that extra information isn't really going to be very useful. Something shorter, like this, may make a lot more sense. But it really depends on what you need to be able to identify this file. 

Now notice this file name has a date in it, or at least a year. A lot of people like to include dates with files especially if they are going to have similar files but for different dates. Either days, months, or years. So in this case you may just want to include the year. It may be useful to have it at the beginning. So something like this may be good. If you need to include month and day you may want to stick with an order where the year is first and then month and then day. That way you can easily sort files and find everything grouped together appropriately. So you may want to do something like this for a month and day or use dashes like that. It's okay to, say, leave off the day if maybe the file applies to the whole month. So maybe something like this for March. 

Another thing to pay attention to is the words that you choose. Some words, like Info here, are kind of useless. They don't really tell you what's in the file. So you want to pick out a word that better defines what's in the file and what differentiates it from other files. Now it is a little clearer what's going on in this file. 

Consistency is also important. If you decide you're going to name files like this with dates with dashes as separators and then a few words after that, then keep up with that. But perhaps not for all of your files. It's okay to be consistent inside of a category, like for instance all of your business related files could be named like this. But maybe your artistic creations could have a completely different kind of file name without the date and using different kinds of words and be more descriptive. So it is okay to group your files together and have it be consistent within that group depending upon the different type of files you have. So this file, say, contains a recipe. You might want to start off with the type of meal first and then get descriptive after that. 

Now notice here I'm using spaces in the file name which works perfectly well. A lot of people like to use something different like, say, maybe underscores instead of spaces or maybe not spaces at all but have everything kind of run together like that. You can mix and match these if you want. For instance, maybe a space there will be appropriate. Just try to be consistent across your files. 

Try not to repeat names. So if you have a name like this and you have other files with the same name or similar names it's going to be hard to tell them apart. So try to be descriptive down to the level that differentiates the files. However, if you've got folders that differentiate different things, like different projects, then it is okay to have the same file names in there. As a matter of fact it may be useful to know that every project folder you've got has files that names similarly so that you can go in and know where to find the information you want. 

Here's what I see happen all the time. Try to avoid repeating the document type inside of the file name. For instance here you can see the extension shows me it's a text file. I would probably know that even without the extension. But I see a lot of people would put, like, you know text or document or even something like list afterwards. If you don't really need it, if it doesn't add anything to the file name try to leave that off. 

One technique I like to use when naming files is to try to imagine myself years from now searching for the information in that file. What is it I would search for to find it? Would those be the words that I would choose to search for that file? Sometimes that means being a little repetitive in a file name. For instance, something like this. I could see myself searching for tax information having to deal with my car by searching for car tax forgetting that the document is really called Car Registration. So I include all of those words in there so I can find it years from now.

Sometimes you want to save multiple copies of a file because they change over time. For instance, you may create an outline for a project and you may have version 1 and then later on update it to version 2. But you still want to keep version 1 around as a separate file so you can refer to it if you need to. So there are a lot of conventions for doing this. You can simply put a number after the file name like that. Or a V and a number. Sometimes a leading zero like this, which aren't really needed for sorting but sometimes it gives you a clue that that is the version number for the file. So then you could have 2, 3, 4 and so on. However you do it just be consistent. So years from now if you can find several different files with basically the same name and a version number you know what it is you're looking at. 

Finally, perhaps the most important thing, is that file names don't need to be permanent. So, you don't have to stress about naming the file exactly right when you initially save it. In fact, I often quickly save a file when I start working on it because I don't want to spend time trying to think of the perfect file name when I'm excited about a new project and I'm writing in Pages or creating a spreadsheet in Numbers. So you can always go back later, either later that same day, and come up with a better file name. Even days or months later you can go through a project and rename the files giving them better file names. So keep that in mind. Just because you name a file something to begin with doesn't mean you're stuck with that name forever. 

So I hope you found these tips for naming files on your Mac useful. Thanks for watching.