I’ve been kind of quiet lately because I’ve been shuffling websites, blogs, and databases from one web server to another. That’s an education, I can tell you! It’s amazing how many files can build up when you’re working on a websites, especially graphics and images. I ended up not only moving my websites but also doing a digital version of spring cleaning.

I’ve been through the same scenario you have: you add a photo but it’s not the right size, so you resize and upload a new one. Pretty soon you have 3 or 4 versions of a file, all with different names that you leave there “just in case.”

Over time I’ve developed a technique to help sort out the files I”m working with during those “tweaking” periods. When I upload a graphic or a photo that is sized down from the original, I add the size and bit-depth to the filename so I can see at a glance what I’m doing. For example, I name a photo “WhatItIs-175pxW-150PPI.jpg”. I use the same title (“WhatItIs”) for each iteration of the file, and then the number of pixels wide (“175pxW”) followed by the pixels per inch (“15oPPI”). You could put both width and height, but I just use width because I spend most of my time adjusting widths of files, and letting Photoshop determine the height proportionally.

Why do I use this file naming? It saves me time if I’ve gone through several iterations. In Windows on my hard drive, I can view the files as thumbnails or mouse over a filename to see the dimensions, but I can’t do either with my FTP program. I save myself a lot of hassles by using this naming convention both locally on the server. You can use upper and lowercase in your filenaming, but remember that on most web servers, everything after the “.com/” is case-sensitive. Also, avoid, avoid, AVOID using spaces in the filenames. Some programs won’t “see” the files if there are spaces in the filenames.

Got a website tip? Feel free to add yours as a comment below.