A file name is a message to yourself in three months’ time. Most of them say nothing. It is also the only search you will ever run, because by then you will not remember what was inside the file — only roughly when you made it.
01Five parts, one order
Check 08 on the Project Start Checklist says to name your files like an adult. This is what that means in practice.
One pattern, on everything:
20260914_ORCHARD_site-plan_v03.indd
Date. Project code. What it is. Version. Extension.
The date is the day you made the file, written year, then month, then day, with nothing between them. The project code is one short word for the whole project, in capitals, so your eye finds it in a list of two hundred things. What it is gets two or three words in lowercase. The version is a number with a leading zero. The extension is the software’s business.
The value is not in any single part. It is in using the same five every time, so a file name becomes something you read rather than something you decode. It takes about a week to stop thinking about it.
I have a folder from my own Part 1 with eleven files called some version of plan. Three are the same drawing. I could not tell you now which one I handed in.
02The date goes first, and it goes in backwards
Sorting a folder by name is alphabetical, and a name that begins with digits sorts by those digits. Written year first, 20260914 falls after 20260903 and before 20261012. That holds in Windows File Explorer, in macOS Finder, in Google Drive and on a memory stick borrowed from someone in the year above. You configure nothing. The folder arrives in the order you did the work.
Written the way we say it out loud, 14-09-2026 sorts by the 14. Every drawing you have made ends up grouped by day of the month, an order that helps nobody. Slashes are worse: 14/09/2026 is not a legal file name at all, because the slash is what the system uses to separate folders.
Year, month, day is ISO 8601, the international standard for writing dates. That single decision is most of what this guide is for.
Sorting by “date modified” is not the same thing. That column changes when you open a file to look at it, so a January sketch opened in December jumps to the top. The date in the name records when the work happened, and it cannot be moved by accident.
All of this assumes one project folder rather than nine.
| What you use | Good for | The catch |
|---|---|---|
No convention — plan, plan2, Untitled-1 |
Nothing to learn and nothing to type. Survivable for a file that lives one afternoon. | The folder sorts by whatever word you happened to start with, so finding anything means opening things. |
Description first, date last — site-plan-14-09-26 |
Readable. You see what the file is before you see when it was made. | Sorts by subject, so every version of a drawing piles up together and the newest sits somewhere in the middle. |
Date first, ISO — 20260914_site-plan |
The folder sorts itself into the order you worked, on any machine, with no settings and no software. | Two files made the same day sit side by side in an order the computer chose. Nothing tells you which came second. |
Date first plus version — 20260914_ORCHARD_site-plan_v03 |
Same-day files sort correctly, and the project code makes a search across a whole drive land on one project. | Longer to type, and it only works if you use it on everything. One rogue Untitled-1 undoes the folder. |
03What a version number is claiming
A version number says something changed. It is not a save counter. You save every few minutes; you version when you have made a change you would be sorry to lose, or one you would want to set beside the previous version and look at. That is v01, v02, v03 — two digits, so v10 sorts after v09 rather than after v01.
Keeping the older versions rather than writing over them is a separate habit. The naming is what makes that habit survivable.
The word to avoid is “final”. It is a prediction, and it is always wrong, because there is one more change after it and no room left in the name to describe it. The same goes for “latest”, “new” and “use this one”.
The exported PDF gets the same treatment: 20261212_ORCHARD_portfolio_v01.pdf. The InDesign portfolio template makes the export one step and the name is the other. It is the part a marker sees when your file lands in a folder next to sixty others.
Do
One pattern, every file, no exceptions: 20260914_ORCHARD_site-plan_v03.indd. Two digits on the version, capitals on the project code, lowercase on everything else.
Don’t
final_final_V2_actualfinal.indd. It is funny once. By week twelve it is four files making the same claim and no way to tell which one is telling the truth.
04Spaces, initials, and digging yourself out
Lowercase for the description. Capitals for the project code only, so it stands out. Underscores between the five parts, hyphens inside a part: site-plan, not site plan, and not sitePlan.
Spaces are the one that catches people, because nothing warns you. A space becomes %20 in a web address, so a PDF called my portfolio final.pdf arrives as my%20portfolio%20final.pdf and looks broken before it is opened. Render queues and command-line scripts split their instructions at spaces, so a path with a space in it reads as two paths and the job fails with an error that never mentions spaces. University machines add the problem from the other end: work sits on a network drive several folders deep, and a long path full of spaces is where a copy stops halfway.
If more than one person touches the file, add initials at the end — 20260914_ORCHARD_site-plan_v03_CH.indd. Two or three letters for whoever last changed it. Worth nothing on your own. In a group it settles the question of whose version is on the screen without anyone having to ask at midnight.
If you are already in a mess, you do not have to rename anything by hand.
- Windows — select the files in File Explorer, press F2, type one name, press Enter.
- macOS — select the files in Finder, right-click, choose Rename items.
- Adobe Bridge — Tools > Batch Rename, for a set of photographs.
Windows numbers them in brackets. The macOS Rename items panel will find and replace text, add text front or back, or renumber a selection. Bridge builds a name out of parts, including the date a photograph was taken, and previews the result before it commits. All three work on a hundred files as easily as on three.
Rename one folder, not the whole drive, and make it the folder with the drawings in it. Then save the next thing you make with the date at the front, and let the pattern build itself from there.