When I organize a digital photo collection I use a consistent naming convention for the photos and videos. I rename each item to reflect the date it was taken. Using the date in the name has much more meaning than IMG_4479!
Not only is using the date to name the photos more meaningful, it helps everything stay in chronological order, alerts me to any photos that have issues with the information in their Date Taken field, and allows me to easily return a photo to the correct place if it gets pulled out of the collection.
To keep everything in order I use a consistent naming convention. The name of each image is the date followed by a space and a sequential number. For the date I most often use the format YYYYMMDD – 4 digits for the year, 2 for the month, and 2 for the day. Then I use a space and a sequential number to keep the photos taken that same day in order. My full format looks like this YYYYMMDD Seq, where Seq is the sequential number. Photos taken December 25, 2023 will be named like this:
20231225 001, 20231225 002, 20231225 003, etc.
All the photos from December 25, 2023, will stay together and in order because our computers, and other software, like to organize files by their names.
I use Adobe Bridge to re-name photos. I can select a group of photos, determine how I want the file name formatted, then re-name them all at once.
Be careful of the characters you choose when renaming your files. I prefer to use the YYYYMMDD Seq format, without dashes, underscores, or parentheses, to represent the date. Right now computer operating systems are fine if you put dashes or underscores in your file name and brackets around the sequential number but they don’t allow slashes like this / or this \ because those are important characters in programming. I don’t know what characters will be OK to use as our operating systems and software programs change, so to future-proof my photo collection I stick to the format without any extra characters.
It’s important to be consistent in how you name your files. If I use the format 20251225 001 on one photo and 2025-12-25 (002) on another photo they will not organize themselves properly. Being consistent allows the photos to organize themselves across my collection and to stay organized in different applications.
Decide on a naming convention you would like to use with your photos and videos. Choose a format that is future proof and begin renaming your collection. You’ll be amazed at how easily it all begins to fit together!