How I Organise My Art Files (Super Helpful!) (Patreon)

Hello lovelies!

Today I have some information for you that’s a lot more practical than it is exciting because I want to talk a bit about how to organise your art files. It’s boring, I know, but having a system in place to organise all of those working files and jpgs so that you can easily find things when you need them is a lifesaver and will save you loads of time and frustration in the long run.

This system might not work for you if you need to categorise your files a particular way, but I’ve been using my system since pretty much the very beginning and it’s hardly changed because it fits every scenario so well. It allows me to see all of my illustrations in the order I drew them, and if I need to find an illustration that I drew in February last year, I can get it in a couple of clicks.

The key thing for everything to be easy to find is to put the date at the beginning of the file name, in reverse order, and that way (assuming your files are organised alphabetically) they’ll always appear in date order.

So every art file I make starts with the date in this order: YYMMDD, and then I add an underscore and put a 1 after it, and if I make another illustration on the same day I would add an underscore and a 2 after it, and so on. So, if I made an artwork on 23rd June 2022, I would name it 220623_1.

It’s not the prettiest naming system but it is SO effective and so easy to find files. Plus you could always add a cuter name after the numbers to describe what the artwork is of, like ‘220623_1 Cute Winter Cottage’.

Then, because I make quite a lot of files, I organise everything in folders labelled by month (if you don’t create many files each month you could label yours by year instead), and the important thing is that the name of the folder starts with what number that month is so that - just like with the individual files - they’ll show up in order as long as your files are organised alphabetically.

I also add the year, so my folder for this month is 2022_06Jun, and the folder for February last year is 2021_02Feb. Make sure that when you number months that you always use two digits (use a 0 before the number for any single digit months) because otherwise they won’t be in order.

The great thing about this system is that if I’m trying to find an artwork from ages ago that’s on my Instagram feed, I can go to Instagram, see what date I posted it, and then I can go to that month in my files and the artwork will be there.

And that’s how I label all of my art files!

For other files that aren’t artwork I have a series of folders each month where I file things like Patreon benefits or YouTube thumbnails from that month.

So if you’re someone who has files all over the place then hopefully this system can help you create some order and save yourself lots of frustration in the future!💕