Name files so they sort themselves
Start filenames with a date in year-month-day order. It sorts chronologically as plain text in every file browser on every platform, with no special support required.
Follow it with a project or source, then a short description. Avoid spaces if the files will ever touch a server, and avoid characters that mean something to a shell.
A filename that describes the content is the only piece of metadata guaranteed to survive being copied, synced, emailed and re-downloaded.
- 1
Pick one structure
By project, by source, or by date — one of them, consistently. The specific choice matters far less than not mixing three.
- 2
Separate raw from finished
Keep untouched downloads apart from anything you have edited. When an export goes wrong you want the original obviously identifiable.
- 3
Prune on a schedule
Most saved media is never opened twice. A periodic clear-out of what you did not use keeps search results meaningful.
Why date-only sorting fails
Sorting by download date works until you have a few hundred files, at which point every result looks identical and the date tells you nothing about what the file is. Dates are a useful secondary axis and a poor primary one.
Backups
A file that exists in one place is not backed up. Phone storage fails, gets lost and gets wiped. Anything you would be upset to lose needs a second copy somewhere physically different.
Synced cloud storage and project organisation inside Frenz are planned rather than available today, so for now that second copy should live wherever you already keep backups.
Common questions
- Does download history count as a backup?
- No. History records what you fetched, not the files themselves — it lets you download something again while the source still exists.