File naming conventions with the goal of legacy and future-proof compatibility across different systems

I am working on archiving all of my digital media.

One area of difficulty has been identifying and sticking to a file naming convention that maintains compatibility across unix, linux, and windows systems. I see there are many threads on this topic, but I wanted to start a discussion for people to share their approaches.

My general goal is to create a convention that minimizes redundancy, is easily searchable, and does not have conflicts across different filesystems and operating systems.

My current thoughts are to follow these general rules:

All lowercase, including extensions
No spaces
Adhere to a file path less than 260 characters
For visual media (photos, videos, etc) use the general format "YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS.extension" where HHMM is the time in military time and SS denotes the seconds (taken from metadata) for images taken within the same minute. This creates an issue though where images taken in burst (multiple images within same second) need to be further distinguished from each other, possibly by HHMMSS-01, -02 etc. There is also the issue of some images not having the appropriate metadata to determine the exact time they were captured, leaving me with no accurate way to name these files.
For documents, I am thinking to again start with the ISO date followed by keywords, where the keywords are single work descriptors of the content "YYYY-MM-DD_keyword1-keyword2"
In this convention "_" separates the date from the keywords and keywords are separated by dashes "-"

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3 comments

I don't think any of your rules actually have anything to do with compatibility between operating systems.

As long as the filename doesn't contain <, >, :, ", /, \, |, ?, or * then it can exist on any operating system.

If you're going to use the file creation time as the filename, just adhere to ISO 8601 with precision to the millisecond. If you're creating multiple image/video files at the same millisecond, your engineering staff can solve that problem for you.

Instead of using keywords, have you heard of this thing called a folder? It's great for organizing arbitrary files!
- I'm not sure OP meant operating systems, necessarily. A system could mean a media server or similar system of applications designed for accessing the data, compared to a system that accesses files in a different fashion.
  
  Or maybe I give OP too much credit because otherwise, yeah a pointless question.
  
  It's deleted now but I definitely recall them asking about compatibility across different operating systems and filesystems. And as long as you stick to Windows' restrictive naming scheme, your filenames will be compatible with everything.