This is the problem:
I hate losing things.
Not in the dramatic, existential sense. I mean the small, daily kind; the missing screwdriver, the wandering teaspoon, the file that exists somewhere but refuses to be found.
I like a cutlery drawer that makes sense. Tools that return to their outline on a shadow board. A place for things, and things in their place.
This, I’ve been told, is called being organised.
It doesn’t feel like that. It feels like good time management.
File naming, strangely, belongs in the same category.
How image names helps when sending photos to people
Early on, when I started sending photographs to magazines, I thought the work was the thing. Take a good photo, send it off, job done. But there were hundreds of us. Hundreds of photographers, all sending files into the same place, all hoping theirs would be the one that got used.
That’s when an editor wrote to me. Brief. Direct. “Make sure your details are in the file name.” No flourish. No explanation. Just that.
It changed the way I worked.
A file name, it turns out, is not just a label. It’s a signal.
It tells the person on the other end what they’re looking at, why it exists, and most importantly, who made it. Without that, your work drifts. It becomes “image 8472.” It becomes guesswork. It becomes, eventually, lost.
With the right file name, everything stays together.
The system itself is not complicated.
In fact, the simpler it is, the more likely you are to stick to it.
There is only one non-negotiable: your name. Every file. Every time. A photograph without your name attached is, in a practical sense, already halfway to disappearing.
If you’re a professional photographer and let’s say you photographed a family, years down the track when they reopen your images, your name is right there on repeat. How’s that for marketing!
From there, you build context.
What is the file for? A magazine, a print, a competition, a client job. The purpose comes first.
Then the subject. A person, a place, a product. Something to anchor it.
Sometimes, if you’re lucky or brave, a title for your art.
And occasionally, a date, structured in a way that keeps things in order. Numbers & systems help. Your future self will thank you.
What's a good file name look like?
The result might look something like this:
Ruth-Eve-GrassHill-KodakFilm-GorakPhoto-1.jpg
Which is, admittedly, less poetic than the photograph itself but just as important.
There are, of course, moments where none of this matters.
A quick post to social media. A throwaway image. Something that will live briefly and disappear.
In those cases, name it whatever you like. But the moment a file leaves your hands and enters someone else’s world – an editor, a printer, a client – the name becomes part of the work.
It is the difference between clarity and friction. Between ease and inconvenience. Between being remembered and being misplaced.
I see this play out every month.
We run a photo competition. Submissions come in from everywhere. Email, file transfers, download links. And more often than not, the files arrive exactly as they left the camera.
IMG_0001. IMG_0002. A quiet parade of anonymity.
If I don’t open them immediately, the connection breaks. Who sent this? When? Which email did it come from? And so begins the search. Folders opened, files previewed, inboxes scanned, trying to reconstruct something that could have been clear from the start.
At the very least
Put your name in the file name.
Send something to your Aunt Helen, someone who isn’t thinking about systems or workflows or metadata. Years from now, she opens a folder. If every image is called photo0001.jpg, the moment is gone.
But if one reads: Melbourne-Trip-2026-Big-Stevo.jpg, then something remains. A place. A time. A person. A small act of naming, doing what it’s always done, holding meaning in place, long enough for it to matter.
File names make a big difference and when they’re done from the start, reduce the headache both for yourself, and for who you send them to.
So, that’s my version of, how to name image files.
What would you add?