If you use Mac only, the idea of using all these features (emoji in filenames? madness! but good madness) is not only fun, it's easier as a human being to see what's what. I firmly believe that the computer should work harder than I do. But, I use Mac, Linux, and Windows, I work in the terminal extensively, and have done web work for decades. I've adopted a severely restrictive file naming convention to make my life easier: lower case letters, never upper case letters, numbers, dashes, dots, underscores; no other characters no spaces nothing (almost) that requires the shift key (which is why my use of underscores is rare) dates, when I use them: yyyymmdd -- easiest sorting, and the lack of dashes doesn't bother me
True about file names but really long file names AND long folder names can cause problems when in nested folders! I've seen that happen in my support work where scientists are extremely descriptive and used many, many, long titled folders. This caused searches to fail to find things because the finder was overwhelmed.
One convention that I sometimes use, if I have multiple files that are similar (say financial statements), is to name the files in a form such as stmtyyyymmdd - for instance stmt20230111 for a statement that came in on January 11 2023. This enables me to sort the files by name, and they will be in chronological order. Also, I can tell by looking at the file name which date it is for. Every naming system has its advantages and disadvantages, but I have found this one to be useful for me at times.
We think alike. 😎 I have a habit of naming nearly everything with the date first, 20230111-[filename] as it makes sorting and finding them easier for me.
I do similar but like the month spelled out to make it just a little easier at a glance to find it. Whats more, my dating system is failsafe using 3 letter month, two numbers for date and year, e.g. “Dec0322” is Dec 3rd, 2022.
If you want to see files in chronological order, regardless of filename, click the date header at the top of the list. You can toggle between oldest or newest first. I usually leave files in reverse chronological order so the files I recently worked on are at top of the list. If I want to see files in alphabetical order, grouped with their backup files, I click the filename header.
7:27 Well, it can be useful to do it anyway in some cases if I'm not wrong. For example, if you're using VLC, it won't play your videos in the proper order if you don't use the " 0 " and have more than 9 videos. Instead of going from 1 to 2 then 3 etc., it will jump from 1 straight to 10,11,12,... The video numbered 2 will only be played after the 19th one.
Gary, One of your strengths is to take information that (for you) is totally basic and refine it down to the fundamentals relevant to all of us. To make a sports analogy, you can win basketball games, however if you don’t understand the rudiments of foul shots and rebounds you probably won’t make it to the Final Four. Every time I watch your videos I come away with “Oh, yes, that’s a better way to do it!” With dates I always include a date (yy-mm-dd) JUST before the “dot” file format. Ex: Example_23-01-11 I input this date with a macro key. Question: Besides opening two Finder windows and comparing, is there any quick way to select a column (ex: Date Modified) and in the SAME window sort by another selection (ex: Kind).
Thank you for your superb educational and professional videos. I am learning so much! Your displays are also very clear and your inverting from light to dark background throughout your videos is greatly appreciated.
Hi Gary. Thank you so much for this tutorial. It was worth it just for the fact that I can use an emoji in my file name. I had no idea!!! I am sure this is going to come in handy in the very near future; much appreciated.
In sorting by dates, the Finder seems to sort, maybe, on the first number it sees, and not count the year as the most significant part of the date. Why is this and what is a work-around? Also, I wish there were more standardization in the order of month-date-year. If you see "8-1-2024" and "1-8-2024" (or maybe "2024-8-1" and 2024-1-8") there is ambiguity between the month and date. It's even worse when the year is given with only two digits! What would be the best way for ALL of us to have a common standard? You are one of the best people to show us how to get out of this dilemma!
Like other commentators, I use a date format for many filenames. But, I use the "yymmdd-filename" format for files I want to keep sorted chronologically. The yymmdd format keeps the file name short and the 4-digit year is not required since the first 2 digits will always be 20. At least for the next 76 years anyway.
You obviously deal with dates since 2000. I was born long before then and still access files I created in the 1900s. It is also useful when working with historical documents.
@@jepomer Actually, I have been using this system since 1991. In the year 2000, I temporarily used a 4-digit year. But, I rarely have projects that last that long. So, all my pre-2000 projects are archived. But, you are correct, I don't have any instances where I am storing 19xx files with 20xx files. I'm not too sure I could even open many of my files from before 2000.
@@SPR8364-0 - I do use both systems depending on the subject matter. But I start with four digits for the year then quickly change to two digits as short hand.
What a great (+ somewhat complex) topic! I've been so happy switching from Windows to Mac (...i too love how leading zeros are NOT required on Mac!). ⚠ EMOJI Filename Warning ⚠: I recommend avoiding the use of Emojis in Folder / FileNames as its has caused complete havoc in my life using Dropbox or OneDrive. Emojis in a filename will crash OneDrive and will cause Dropbox to entirely SKIP Syncing the files with Emojis #FML!). As always @Gary, thanks for making these vids that make it simple while broaching the advanced knowledge, you're very good at this! keep it up, cheers!
So glad I watched this. I always hesitated to use spaces, but now see it is OK to use. Didn't know abut emoji use, and thought search was only for file name. Thank you so much for the video!
Nice overview. While I understand Apple moved to file extensions for interoperability with Windows and *nix systems, I’m sad to see that file type and creator codes have been deprecated. They were more elegant.
I use the period before a file name or a folder name to hide that object. There is nothing wrong with using a period before a file name or folder name. You just won’t see that file in finder until you turn on the option to show hidden files and folders. And to see them in Finder, use the keyboard shortcut shift-command-period.
I don't put spaces in file names because you may need to enclose the file in quotes referencing it in the future, or sometimes apps will turn them into other characters.
Apps shouldn't turn them into other characters. That's a major bug if you have some app that is changing file names or something. As for quotes, that's a common thing when using the Terminal, but it is easy to add the quotes or \ and for the vast majority of users this is not a concern.
Funny thing is some Apple apps, notably GarageBand, create file names with dates including forward slashes. If you Share - Export Song to Disk the automatic file name is project name - date time where date is d or dd/m or mm/yyyy (this is in Australia, I imagine in the States month comes before day).
Thanks for mentioning windows restrictions. I frequently have to manage files on both platforms and in a browser, so less special characters the better
11:26 Hi Gare. The tips are very useful, as are in general the videos you publish here on RU-vid. I wonder if the special characters of the Portuguese language are well accepted in file names, as occurs in the word “coração”, for example. Thank you for the content you post daily here!
Thanks Gary! Any chance that you show us Alfred? I use it for my private Mac and the search is so much better than spotlight. Maybe other people would appreciate to know that. And maybe you can show us many more things to do productively with it! :)
Fantastic as usual, Gary. Would you please consider a session on how to rename JPEGs in the ‘Photos’ app, including titles and dates. It appears that dates and times cannot be changed. A pity, particularly when it comes to working with scanned images, of which I have thousands.
You can change the titles and dates pretty easily by bringing up the Info window for the Photo, or using View, Metadata, Titles so you can edit the titles right under the photo, and using Image, Adjust Date and Time... to change the date.
@@macmost Thank you so much Gary. Your advice is much appreciated. I have now discovered that by clicking 'Get Info' and then (double clicking) the date*, the latter* can indeed be changed, which is important for me as thousands of my jpegs have been scanned on a Windows PC and then migrated over to my new Mac and the 'Photos' app. Back in the 'Windows world' I was able to change the name of each Jpeg, but that is now no longer the case and instead, there is a now 'Title' option in 'greyed out' font which can be changed. I can also add a 'Caption' and I can add 'Keywords'. All still a little mysterious to me, but indicating some potential, which I have yet to fully explore. I for my part would love to see a video from you and your fantastic way to simplify things on how to appropriately handle/name scanned Jpegs. Thanks again Gary and I acknowledge your busy life.
A really helpful explanation of how to use file names in ways that make human sense. One thing I’ve wondered though is if I change the extension, say from .pages to .pdf will the computer save the file as a pdf instead of a Pages document, or keep both or what? And does it automatically know to convert the file to the different format? I also see this with .docx to .pages
You shouldn’t change the extension yourself in most cases. If you select File-SaveAs (or, sometimes, File-Export) from within an application, it will save it in the proper format and automatically change the extension.
No. Changing the file extension just changes the file name. So you would have a Pages document with a .pdf file extension that would not open properly because you have the wrong extension.
Hi Garry, I have a video suggestion for you. I found that the there is a lot of confusion on he two features of messaes app: text message forwarding and sync. What I understand that sync will sync the whole history across devices but text message forwarding will only sync the messgaes between devices from the time this feature is turned on. Also, there is no way we can easily delete the imessages synced on iCloud but deleted from iphone. The only suggestion I got from the apple agent was to delete the messges from cloud, stop the sync, wait for 30 days (as after 30 days the icloud backup is completely deleted) and then sync the messges again. This all is very confusing so if you can make a video on this, many people will benefit.
Text message forwarding is about SMS messages. Your Mac can't send SMS messages because it isn't connected to a mobile phone network. So your iPhone acts as a relay so you can send Mac->iPhone->SMS and receive SMS->iPhone->Mac. It works so well that most people don't realize this.
Fine video. But I missed a path length discussion for Mac. This can give interoperability issues with Windows and some cloud systems and compression utilities?
Great informaion as always my guy! I came here hoping to find information about an error I have been encountering trying to use a common naming scheme for hard drives and SD drives. They are both giving me issues when using like 8 character's now when before I never had any issues with it whatsoever. Any ideas there?
Two questions: 1) are there any drawbacks to using diacritical marks in file names? 2) Is there any global way to bring old, pre-OSX files into a modern Mac system and keep the information about what kind of file it is? (This is now done by extensions, but before Apple switched to a Unix-based file system, extensions were unnecessary and rare.)
1) I suppose if you transfer those files to another computer system that doesn't support it. Also, searches may be more difficult for you (or easier, it depends). 2) I suppose you could bring over some files and then use batch rename in the Finder to add the extension to them. Depends on the specific situation so hard to suggest something.
!) I was thinking of anyone speaking and writing another language, where accents and so on are not optional as they are in English. (Yes, all OSes and all apps ought to be Unicode-based. But they aren't always.) 2) That's pretty much what I thought. If you already know what kind of files they are, you can append the appropriate extension. But you have to be working in the old OS to be able to tell what kinds of files they are (unless you happen to remember). This is a real problem for anyone with lots of old files that might need to be opened again, updated, or re-used. @@macmost
Hi Gary - this answered several questions I've had for years. Very useful info. Question: Is there a leading character that will force a file to END of the (alphabetized) list? As always, thanks for your excellent, well-presented content!
You should avoid really long file/folder names (if you can). And another thing, or something I’m used to, always name my files (and folders) with lowercase letters. Then I don’t have to remember when or where I used uppercase etc. But I usually have a naming convention like this: YYYY-MM-DD_super-cool-name super-cool-name_YYYY-MM-DD
Excellent Gary, thank you. I wonder what happens to a Mac file containing characters which are reserved in Windows. Does it truncate the filename after the illicit character?
I don't know why, but when using cmd+delete while editing a file/folder name, sometimes it put the file/folder in the trash instead of deleting all the characters to the left.
Can you create a file eg Michael Murphy and within the Michael Murphy file have subfiles such as letters to him in 2019, 2022, 2023 etc. Thanks. Great videos.
I work with A LOT files. My problem is when a file name has already been used in the same folder it quits the renaming instead of asking to add a number in front or something like that (as Windows does), so I have to manually search for the file to check out if it is the same file indeed. It sucks!
To me, there is a big difference in the meanings of a hyphen and a dash in terms of their meanings within normal discourse. At about 9:00 into your video, you say "dash" for what appears to be a "hyphen". Does this matter in computer language?
The only thing I am talking about here is what you get when you type the key on your keyboard to the right of 0 with no modifiers. That's all you would ever want to use in filenames. For literary and typesetting uses, see ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-frFWrnrI1pk.html
"Best" is subjective. But for most people all they need to read/view PDFs is the built-in Preview app. As for "editor" that depends on what you mean by editing. For "markup," Preview is pretty good. For actual editing you can't beat going back to the source document (Pages, Word, InDesign, etc) and editing and producing a new PDF from that. See ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-vK1sWu2M9Lw.html
stating whti a . error message ios You can’t use a name that begins with a dot “.”, because these names are reserved for the system. Please choose another name.
Is that a problem to have a lot of files on a desktop on a Mac? I know it used to be an issue on Windows and I still avoid to do that, but sometimes I wisk to have everything I need right on my home screen.
Do you mean from one of the courses I offer at RU-vid? Not sure how it looks in the iPad app or mobile browser. The RU-vid courses thing is new and there are growing pains. But you can find ALL my courses at courses.macmost.com, and I recommend getting them there instead anyway. If you get my newsletter I publish a 20% coupon code for my courses site at the start of each month. (Also a whopping 50% coupon for most of my Patreon supporters).
@@macmost Yes sure... for eg if I make a certain placeholder in the template of a document itself and whatever I type in that it automatically becomes the name of the document
My desktop folders display the folder name. However, all folders that are within folders do not display folder name. Any idea on how to get all folders to display their name? Thanks for saving my sanity!
@@macmost In icon view. So desktop folders have their name displayed below. But when you open a folder, the folder that are within are just the folder icon without the name displayed.
@@fletchkfletcher So ANY Finder window with Icon view does this? Try using View, Show View Options and then adjust text size, label position, grid size, etc and see if you can fix it.
So how do I remove an app from launchpad , ex. HP Email Alerts, there is no x when you press to get all of them to jiggle. I don't have an HP printer. I was able to remove all of the others, just not this one?
Thank You for responding. I have learned so much from you, I don't know why I did not have a Mac years ago. Anyway, I did an uninstall when I changed printers. However this one, will not go away. It is not on my applications list. When I right or left click on it with my mouse, the screen returns to my previous screen. I have not seen on like this before. It is like it's there, but nothing attached to it. It does nothing, just occupying space.
@@jamesandkimwilcox2908 Did you look in the Application folder for it? Find it there and remove it. But first I'd look at the website for it to see if they have uninstall instructions.
@@macmost Thank You for your reply. It is not in the applications folder. I will look on the web site to see if they have an uninstall. Thank you. Your videos are amazing.
Changing core file properties will, someday, bite you. You'll discover after while that prefixing filenames with a date, the date becomes invisible, like the frames when you wear glasses. It's there if you need it, but in files named, for instance, 20221111-letter-to-grandma.txt 20221211-letter-to-grandma.txt 20230111-letter-to-grandma.txt it's not hard to see what they contain, but also how they relate across time.
Hi Gary, I am wondering why when I am searching in Finder for a file I think I downloaded before, I often need to significantly reduce the length of the file before Finder will locate the file?
@@macmost No, it's all mac files and no external drive. the "Name contains the filename" or "contains the filename" - is it going off keywords in filename or the whole filename?
@@jockaud Should be anything that matches within the filename. Maybe if it isn't working you should try re-indexing Spotlight. support.apple.com/en-us/HT201716
I know you would scold me for doing this but some times I need to toss something from the system... Mac rebels. So I drag it out, rename it "toss.txt" no matter what it was before - even an app... and trash happily takes care of it now. Yeah, I'm a rebel and don't like Mac telling what I can and can't do.
Hey, Gary! Terrific as always! What do you think about discussing with us, in a video, the Dewey Decimal System or any other types of file organizations? Thanks in advance! Ps: I get this idea while I was learning to use ALFRED from this nice channel. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-XyPmVU15OXE.html
you can have the same file name but in 2 or more diffent folders 4 or less cat.wav cat wav it will say keep both stop repace if you try to copy 5 ro more with the same extenion like cat.way cat .way cat way cat.way cat.way it wil say repace stop
I may have missed this in this presentation but I would like to know how to keep Mac from assigning a really long file name to a scanned document when I save it. If I type in something simple like May 2022 Rent I get a really long file name that has not only what I put in but also Mac applied monthdateyearsdhfsodhs.pdf (made up the extension myself just to show the frustration. Maybe just type May 2022 Rent.pdf? Thank you
@@macmost Hi Gary, it’s a built in utility in the Canon software, not a stand alone app. I’m going to get into the software package today and review the settings options. I hadn’t considered looking there until you mentioned it. I’m a 1st time Mac user so it’s a bit slow going. Your teachings are a tremendous help. The printer / scanner does double duty between the Mac and a Windows computer. It works fine on both but it doesn’t add the long date extension when I scan with the Windows computer. It saves the scan (pdf) with the name I give it. That’s why I suspected the Mac.
@@HabuBeemer The name is assigned by the app, not macOS. So the setting would be there. Note that you don't need to use Canon's app to scan, though it may give you options that are not available any other way. But you can try using the Image Capture app that comes with your Mac if you like.
