I’ve been thinking through my PC lately, and trying to make it more useful to my needs (and, in some ways, more fun), and file structure has been something I’ve been preoccupied with.
The traditional Documents/, Pictures/, Videos/, Downloads/ structure doesn’t work all that well for me. It puts me in a position where I can’t seem to remember where I’ve placed things. I’ve been using a more flat structure, with folders like inbox/, notes/, teaching/, career/, teaching/, scholarship/books/, languages/, infrastructure/, and so on. I use inbox/ as a mix of downloads and things I’m currently working with, and notes/ are entirely in markdown.
I also tend to name my files things like YYYYMMDD_kebab-case[-v1/-v2/etc.], occasionally writing NN after DD if there are multiple files from the same day in the folder.
Finally, I prefer markdown over all other formats, but so much of what I have is in PDFs, .docx/.odt, and so on. I find it frustrating when a folder has a ton of different file types, but I’m not sure how standard this is.
How do you all organize your files? What works for you, what doesn’t?
i don’t do a ton of organization outside of the default home folder structure in linux to be honest. aside from that i do keep pictures that i am sharing separate but that is really it. i know one day keeping pictures with the name my camera gives them is probably something i’ll want to change. but i’m not in the headspace to go about that right now
I try to be organized, but most things just end up going into the ~/Documents directory. With the addition of ~/Projects standardized within the XDG user directory spec, I’m making a concerted effort to use it for that intended purpose. So far, results across my devices are mixed.
The website and its assets, however, is cleanly organized… outside of the commented-out code and snide remarks to myself about performance metrics.
I mostly use my computer to do art and work on my website, so my organization is pretty simple.
/Desktop is for art and shortcuts.
/art/ for art, with sub-folders for character refs, art for others, logos, etc and sub-folders within those for specific projects
/Documents is for video projects (because that was where video editors put it by default so I got used to keeping it there) and files I don’t want to lose.
/Downloads is for anything I consider temporary and will eventually delete.
Stuff I absolutely can’t lose (specific art folders, stuff related to my profession, my website’s files, etc) gets copied onto on a thumb drive which has some folders of its own but those folders largely mimic what I have on the computer. I exclude working files (ex: .kra), from the thumb drive.
I’ve been slowly transitioning to camelCase with dates in YYYY-MM-DD format but I did a lot of stuff before I decided on that so it’s a mess right now. Renaming it all would probably require a script and I don’t have the knowledge to do that yet.
I have a kind of Home, WIPS, and Organizer folders on my desktop. WIPs are any ongoing projects I access often and Organizer is a very messy misc folder. All important stuff goes into Home where it’s broken into Art, Projects, Photos, Videos, Library, Documents etc. It’s honestly not the best sorting system but one thing someone suggested that really worked for me is to try and not go deeper than 5 folders.
So for example: Home (0) → Graphics (1) → F2U Graphics (2) → Icons (3) → Movie Icons (4) → Star Wars Icons (5)
or for something with a shorter path
Home (0) → Art (1) → Art 2026 (2) → Krita Files 2026 (3)
For me personally, knowing the maximum depth level of the folders helps keep track of things better. Essentially, I used to make like waaay too many subfolders and now I can somewhat avoid that. It hasn’t solved the disorganized misc or download folders but its better than nothing ahah
The only real structure I have and keep consistent is with my photos, drawings and documents, which uses a folder structure in their seperate folder:
2026 → 07July → Stuff goes in here. For photos I also have a sub folder like 20260727_DailyPhoto for specific days, because it can be a lot of photos for a month.
Other than that it’s more all over the place, also due to me having many systems where I can work on which includes Linux, Mac and Windows.
It’s really interesting how everybody evolves their own system which they can feel comfortable with.
I let my pc do what it wants on the C: drive – it has ideas on how to sort things and i cba to fight it. it helps that I have none of “my” files there, just program files and stuff. Mostly because there isn’t much space and because I have a D: drive too lol. That one also has some of the standard folders, but then it has person-specific folders: mainly my stuff. that one looks like this:
wich is all I really need. Some are mainly folders for folders (school, organised by course, web design and gamedev, organised by project) while most are a mix (drawing n design, project folders and random stuff, images, some categories, some random images, music, some playlists, some random stuff, etc). Honestly, it’s not exactly over-organised but it works. The folders within these folders have varied structures depending on what i need, simple as. Like a GIS course will have subfolders for different maps, which have folders for different data etc, whilst one with PDFs and text documents only will just be course folder → all the files, hopefully named something reasonable lol
honestly considering how chaotic my entire pc is in theory it works incredibly well 99% of the time
