[pronaway]

Throwaway, but I've used it to organize downloaded porn. Downloaded videos tend to have terrible filenames, but reasonable titles or tags on the website. I have some scripts to scan through the filenames and automatically apply tags, but for the most part it still goes unused. It's a fun idea though.

[Springtime]

A number of years ago my media filenames were getting out of hand and after a drive crash I decided to start naming all media files manually with a basic structure. It worked quite well and I've kept to the same basic idea for a number of years, with more than 10k files named this this way when initially saving the file.

It follows a fairly loose mental structure: Broad Category - [Sub-category -] [Series Title -] Name/Media Title (Creator, Source, Short Description/Tags)

Which usually looks something like:

* Keyboards - Keycaps - Warmaster (martinyeah, geekhack.org) - 2.jpg

* Paintings - Market In Cairo (Leopold Carl Müller, Middle Eastern desert).jpg

* Themes - Android - Themer (mycolorscreen.com) - Wrong Way (Victor Burgoa).png

* Trailers - Godzilla (2013) - Comic-Con Teaser.mp4

* Typefaces - Lettering - Gospel Waffle Sunday syrup logo time-lapse (Lauri Johnston).mp4

The basic idea has been to organize the filenames by broad to narrower info from left-to-right, which helps with quick filtering/searching and allows many categories of files to be kept in large single directories while being readable. By adding the creator and site where needed it also allows me to trace the source. Not a perfect naming system but it only takes a little longer to save while adding considerable value long-term.