How I organize my digital documents
I’ve put much thought into how I organize my home directory. This is what I love most about using a lightweight, highly customizable, geeky and elitist operating system. You won’t be able to reproduce this system with a mainstream OS without figuring out how to tell your applications to let go of the default (and sub-optimal) directories. The system is planned for fast to typing on the command line and is also quite french/english bilingual. The most important innovation is the elimination of a “documents” folder in favor of a resources and a production directories. Also, the pictures library is future proofed, relying strictly on the filesystem for it’s structure.
######## Utilities
tmp/ Downloads, inbox, short lived files
bak/ Backup of configuration files, useful to have
during software updates to allow rollbacks. This
is not my actual full system backup.
bin/ Scripts, binaries.
######## Work
prod/ Production, things I created or worked on.
art/ Things I made for myself, sorted by media, then
by date and title.
blog/
drawing/
2010-04.Something/
photography/
and_so_on/
*/ Other directories are named after companies and
people's names for whon I did work.
res/ Resources, work from other people, downloads
to keep, collections, manuals, source codes,
ebooks, databases.
wip/ Work in progress. This directory allows quick
access to projects I'm currently working on.
It can also act as a task list. Projects can
move to and from prod/.
######## Multimedia
mm/
m/ Music
Artist/
Albums/
p/ Pictures (see next section)
v/ Video (movies). I delete them or burn them on
a DVD to keep the directory small enough.
######## Multimedia/Pictures
Much inspiration from www.organizepictures.com
All entertainment/nostalgia pictures go in ~/mm/p.
This directory is split in categories such as events,
collection, outbox, wallpaper. The camera is emptied
in the tmp/ directory then images are processed and
organized. When a category gets larger, it is split in
years subdirectory. The personnal library is the most
important so years directory for this one are directly
on the ~/mm/p/ level. Events directories start with an
ISO9660 date and the format is uniform for easy
parsing and scripting.
0/ Undated/old pictues from childhood
2010/
yyyy-mm[-dd].location.event_description/*.jpg previews
1/*.NEF raw originals
4x6/*.tiff exports
web/*.jpg compressed
wallpaper/*.png conversions
outbox/ Hard links to images in above subdirectories
wallpapers/ Hard links to images in above subdirectories
collection/ Cool/interesting downloads to keep
tmp/ Temporary directory for camera dump
Other resources on the subject
- Organizing “My Documents”, a good start.
- organizepictures.com, brilliant and very complete.
- Your brain’s natural ability to categorize things. Just give it time to process how your files can be grouped and divided.
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Alexandre de Verteuil
Senior Solutions Architect
I teach people how to see the matrix metrics.
Monkeys and sunsets make me happy.