File and Folder Organization
Having all the necessary files present is important when your digital philatelic study must be portable. Nothing is worse than getting to a show in a strange city — with dealers that have your gems — and having forgotten a file that makes the study work. Submitting your study to be evaluated in a competition and having files missing is a close second.
Keeping all your files together in an organized fashion will allay most of your fears that something is not available when needed.
Ensuring everything is in the same place can be relatively easy by using one main folder for all files used in the study. This main folder may also contain subfolders. As illustrated in Figure 1, the Piltdown_Study folder contains subfolders for documents (docs), images (pics), references, and varieties. Organizing your files by either file type or subject is perfectly acceptable.
When using a series of folders and/or files, you may wish to associate the file and folder names to each other to appropriately identify their content. Graphics or image scans might be in a folder named pics for instance. Within the pics folder, a file might be named pic_stamp_variety_1.jpg. Use file names that make sense to you, but also are not something other viewers will not understand easily.
Fig. 1 - Folder and File Organization
We all modify our files occasionally and/or update them with the latest information.
In doing so, we often retain older versions or even versions with or without certain content. To help keep these versions straight, it’s useful to modify the file name slightly to indicate it is a version. This is usually done with a sequence number or letter. Using the example above, the modified version might be pic_stamp_variety_1a.jpg and a subsequent version would be pic_stamp_variety_1b.jpg.
At a higher level, the hardware media the study is stored on should also have a name. When a Compact Disc (CD) is inserted into a computer’s drive, the CD’s name appears under the icon and again, that name should also be directly associated with your study’s subject.
Bottom line — name everything and insist the names are descriptive enough that your non-collecting spouse can identify the file or folder content from the name.
Does it take a little thought and time to do this? Yes, but you’ll be happy you did when you come back to do an update a year from now. 
