Name game
naming conventions for beginners
One overlooked area to DAM success is building a naming convention before you start adding assets.
Mission statement: Naming conventions can help teams find what they need more quickly, share assets more easily and onboard teammates more smoothly. Good naming keeps companies on-brand and organized as they quickly scale content.
But what is “good naming” anyway? To me good naming is consistent, clear and repeatable. It means your users will feel comfortable adding new assets and able to find them again later. When you add new areas of content to your DAM, you will only have to update an existing naming guide, not start from scratch. When new asset providers join your team, you will be able to onboard them with clean rules instead of correcting them later. And because you have uniform abbreviations and format, you have enough room in the name to add SEO-friendly keywords that reinforce the rest of the metadata before adding any tags, description etc. from just the name itself.
Good goals, but how to begin?
If you have completed a content audit, you should have a good idea of what kinds of files you will be adding to or organizing within your DAM. If you are powering a CMS (content management system) for a website, you will include each area of the site you will be populating with images, documents and video. A work-in-progress DAM will also need to include version and format naming information.
Talk to your asset creators, content writers, design leads, art buyers and anyone you think can give valuable information when it comes to naming. If you are in-person, pin up some sample photos and ask people to use post-its to name them. If remote, use tools like Mural for a similar exercise. Ask about project names, department codes, DIN/item numbers, and any jargon you don’t understand.
Once you have this information, it’s time to start designing a naming strategy.
Create a naming template
One template begins with a code (by project, site area, module name) that you can socialize with an abbreviation list (fear not, I will detail in a later post) based on your DAM structure (ditto!) to keep the character count manageable. Follow that up with the type of asset, a couple of descriptive keywords and the file format.
In this case, I followed this template for naming an inline jpg image I’m using in this substack, Give a DAM, posting on 8/16/22.
Best practices
But why did I arrange the date in that order? Use lowercase? Follow these DAM naming best practices that combine web style guides and library science rules to ensure your assets will work no matter which DAM platform you use:
Assets should be named consistently, depending on asset type.
Asset names should be short but descriptive (<50 characters).
Avoid special characters or spaces in a file name.
Use underscores instead of periods, spaces or slashes.
Use date format YYYYMMDD if adding to description
Include a version resolution, size or format if applicable to Work in Progress assets but these must be cleaned up before adding the final asset to the DAM.
Review your DAM structure for where and how to name each asset
Use uniform naming abbreviations.
Once you have figured out what to name your assets, you may look at your assembled files and wonder how you will accomplish it. Deep breaths, as Dolly said, pour yourself a cup of ambition, and get started. She famously wrote Jolene and I Will Always Love you on the same day, so lower your expectations for yourself.
One trick: On Mac, select assets, File > Rename to append or replace name. Great for adding a project code to the beginning of a bunch of assets or mass renaming a set of photos. If you need more granular help, the Renamer app is free and there are several options for Windows too.
If you build it, will they come?
We will talk user adoption in detail in weeks ahead, but your naming convention is only as good as its adoption. Share the naming BROADLY as part of a style guide, content rulebook or company wiki and make sure your stakeholders (remember the people who gave their opinions way back when you were devising the naming convention?) agree with the template and will reject assets that ignore it.
With many DAM platforms treating uploaded assets as fixed and making renaming difficult, getting the name right before ingest is vital. What’s in a name? Hopefully another step in helping your DAM work for your team and your team work with your DAM.