Periods and dashes work best for dates, because Windows and Mac will not accept the following characters in a file name: \\ / ? : * \” > < | There are also certain rules as far as naming conventions go. When naming files, it’s important to remember that filenames on Windows and Mac have to be less than 260 characters, which includes file extensions that are automatically applied to files such as JPG and RAW. Later when you want to make a photo board to display at Brian’s high school graduation party, you can quickly search through each year to find a photo of him from every birthday.
When naming folders or files with dates, starting with the year first can help keep files organized when sorting. Tags come in handy when categorizing photos by specific holidays, vacation spots, people, events, seasons, months, and years. Save the specifics for tags, for example, Brian, Birthday, 2013, and September will make far better search terms than filenames. It might make sense at the time of import to label an album “Brian’s 15 th Birthday”, but years later the year and date will probably make more sense. For instance, if you import photos from a birthday party, include the date and event in the file names. When naming files, try to keep naming conventions consistent and stick to naming folders and images in a way that will make sense years from now.
