Tutorial - Simple File Indexing

TUTORIAL

Simple File Indexing

(excerpt from the book Stephen Johnson on Digital Photography unreleased revised electronic version)

For many years I've been tracking my digital files with a simple little utility called Disk Tracker.

It is just a simple file name and basic info tracker, that indexes disks automatically or manually and lets you search for files at will. There are many file tracking utilities out there, for both the Mac and the PC. I would strongly suggest you use one of them, even if you are using Lightroom or Aperture with their built-in databases.

Finding precious files is of course made much easier by careful file naming to begin with, particularly for photographs. Which is why I always custom name my photographs on download into a sequence that helps me identify and find the images later.

Example

Date as start of file name:
20110405

Custom location name:
ptlobos

Then numbered sequence within the set:
0001

Resulting in a stream like this:
20110405_ptlobos_0001