Do you have a plan in mind when naming photos and folders?
A person with no plan is going to pay sooner or later. And a person who changes file naming schemes often is also in for deep trouble. I am experiencing some of this pain right now. I am nearly finished moving all my photos over to my new Drobo, but it’s been a real chore. It was difficult only because I changed how I named my folders. Now, I wanted everything to be consistent so I had to rename quite a few folder names. It took much more time than if I had just maintained the same naming scheme all along.
Here’s what I do now. When I import a photo shoot into Lightroom, I rename each photo by assigning the date first and then a sequential number starting with 1. The file name looks like this: 20100323-23 This way I will never have a file name with the same name as another one.
I also name the folder with the date of the photo shoot and a descriptive name. Something like: 2010-03-28 Middle School Musical. This makes it easy to find a folder by date or name.
There is no real right or wrong way to name files or folders, but find something that works for you and stick with it!