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Warning: I spent 3 hours renaming 400 design files because I skipped one basic step
I finally sat down to clean up a client folder from a rebrand project that ran from January to March, and I thought it would take maybe 20 minutes. Two hours and 45 minutes later I was still fixing names, because somewhere in the handoff the files got saved as final_v2, final_v2_REAL, and final_v2_REAL_use-this-one. The real problem was that I never set a naming rule before the project started, so every round of changes just piled up with whatever label felt clear at the time. I ended up opening 400 files one by one just to see which version was actually current, and I found three that were totally blank. My fix going forward is dumb simple: every file gets the date first, then the project name, then the round number, and nothing gets saved outside the main folder. That took me about 15 minutes to set up in my template, which is a lot less than the afternoon I lost. I also made a short note of what each round changed, which saved me from opening files just to check. Curious how other people handle version names when two or three people are all saving into the same folder.
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max6819d ago
The date-first trick only works if you use the same date format every time, otherwise 03-05 and 3-5 land in totally different spots when you sort.
Your real fix is the round note, but be careful, some apps rewrite that kind of file on save and wipe it out.
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