Short file names

Recently I made a personal consulting visit to a member's house of the church I am attending. The person had SEVERAL gigs of pictures on her computer (for those that don't know what a "gig" is it's basically 100,000 empty word documents).

This user had organized her pictures in a way in which several folders were inside other folders. So for example in her "My Pictures" folder, she had a 2008 folder, and in that folder was an "October" folder, and inside that folder was another folder, say "Dad's birthday party". However instead of these folders being short folder names like in my example, they were basically sentences detailing what was in the folder. And instead of just going three folders deep, she went 5 to 6 (or more) folders deep. Now I personally like this type of file management b/c it allows easy understanding to what that folder is about and what the files contained within this folder is about.

However, where this person was having problems is in some of the folders she could not open the pictures up. You could also not rename the files of the pictures.

So what was her problem? Well as you might have guessed it, the long names of her folders and files were causing Windows to have issues with properly dealing with the files. You see Windows has a certain length that a file path can be. And if the file path exceeds this amount then you run into problems with normal operation of the file (opening, saving, editing, etc). So in order to fix this problem all I had to do was rename one of the folders and give it a much shorter name. One thing is that if you are REALLY over the limit you might have to rename two of the folders in order to get below this maximum limit that Windows has.

So for today's post I just wanted to encourage everyone to practice good file organizational habits, however in doing so remember to keep those file and folder names short. If you need to know what the contents of a folder is all about, throw in a text document within that folder giving a more detailed explanation of what the folder contents were all about. Btw, if you put a "!_" at the front of the file name it will show up as the first file within that folder.

Oh and one more thing. BACK UP YOUR PICTURES!