Lost a whole digital painting at a convention because of bad file naming

I was at Anime Expo in LA last July, showing my portfolio to a few gallery people. Had a piece I spent maybe 30 hours on, complex cityscape with neon lights. When I went to pull it up on my tablet, I couldn't find it because I saved it as "untitled_15" or something dumb like that. Took me 5 frantic minutes in front of them to locate it, and I could tell they were annoyed. Now I name files with the date, the subject, and a version number every single time. Has anyone else lost work to messy file organization?

1 comments

1 Comment

hall.joel7h ago

I read this article about a pro concept artist who lost a whole client commission folder because they named everything "final_2" and "final_3" and then did a hard drive cleanup by accident. They had to redo like 40 hours of work because they couldn't tell what was the actual final version lol. Your untitled_15 story gives me anxiety just thinking about it. What saved me was making a simple template system date_projectname_v1 and sticking to it for everything, even dumb sketches.