How to Name Folders for Photos: A Clear System for Organizing Digital Pictures

Creating clear, descriptive folder names is the first step in organizing digital pictures. This guide shows you how to name folders for photos using a simple structure based on date, place, and a short description.

Naming your folders correctly is one of the simplest and most effective ways to organize digital photos. A clear folder name helps you remember when and where an event happened and makes it easy to find the pictures you need later. In this guide, you’ll learn how to name folders for photos using a consistent structure based on date, place, and a short description — a system that keeps your photo library organized for years.

Why Folder Names Matter When Organizing Digital Photos

Have you ever wondered how you remember events? If someone asks you if you remember being at a certain event, what do you need in order to remember it? Do you need to know what season it was, spring or fall? Or how about the time of day: day or night?

While these things may help, most of us would most likely need three pieces of information in order to remember a certain event.

Three pieces of information you need for naming folders for photos:

• Date (at least an approximation)
• Place
• A description of the event. (usually a short description would suffice).

This is a very simple observation, but it turns out to be very powerful when it comes to organizing your pictures. Most people take pictures at certain events (professional photographers are an exception to this rule) and it is these events that they would have to remember in order to locate the pictures they have taken. Therefore, naming your folders for photos such that the name includes these three pieces of information will help you remember the event you’re looking for, and therefore you should be able to locate the pictures you want to find. Inserting specific pieces of information in your folder names means that you are actually “tagging” your folders instead of adding image tags in your individual image files.

A Simple Folder Naming Convention That Always Works

Here is my naming convention that captures all these pieces of information in a simple format:

• Example: 2007-11-Malibu-Adamson-House_visit
• Naming convention: [Date]-[Place]-[description]
• Folder name includes a date for its content. You need at least the year and month. (2007-11 = November 2007)
• • Use 4 digits for the year
  • Use 2 digits for the month
  • Use 2 digits for the day (optional)
  • Use some sort of delimiter between the date fields (underscore or dash).
  • Folder name contains the place of the event. (i.e. Malibu)
  • Folder name contains a brief description of the event (3 short words max). (Visit to the Adamson House museum)

Read More: Organize your pictures in 5 easy steps

Stick to Your Naming System for Long-Term Organization

The most important thing about naming conventions is to stick to them. I mean that if you agree to name your folders with this structure you always have to do it the same way, otherwise the system will not work. This means that you always put the date first, the place second and the description third. Out of all three, the date is the most important and it should always come first so that your operating system will automatically sort your folders according to the date…which is really nice!

Essentials for organizing your digital photos

Here are the essential products and services I have come to rely on for many years to keep my media collection organized and safe. Even though these are affiliate links, I wholeheartedly recommend them.

Excellent Lightroom alternative. If you need a cheaper and simpler photo manager then ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac or ACDSee Photo Studio Professional for Windows is my preferred solution for organizing all my media. It has a very fast browser, great image editing and it's simple to use.

If you do a lot of image editing like I do, I recommend using Adobe Lightroom Classic CC via the annual Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. Lightroom has best photo editing capabilities even though it has a steeper learning curve. Adobe Lightroom is my favorite for image editing.

I recommend Backblaze Personal Cloud Backup for affordable & reliable unlimited cloud backup. I have been using Backblaze for backing up all pictures & videos for more than 5 years now. All my invaluable digital memories are safe and secure. This is the best solution especially if you have a large quantity of media files.

Use a reliable & affordable external hard drive for backing up everything on your computer. It is absolutely essential for keeping all your memories backed up and safe.

Start organizing now using detailed, step-by-step instructions and videos:
Personal Coaching (closed) Independent Course Private Lessons
Reference book Basics book

YOURS FREE! 10 crucial steps most people miss when organizing their digital photos

Most people want to just organize their digital pictures and ignore these crucial steps right at the beginning...when they are shooting and transferring their digital pictures. Then they wonder why they can't organize their digital photos! Avoid most people's mistakes and start on the right track!

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