When dealing with hundreds of different clients who have different websites, designs, logos, documents, pictures, worksheets, etc. things must be organized. I have found that an excellent way to organize files via Finder is to use the colorful labels. Yes the labels are pretty and colorful, but they can be used to organize things beyond just their color.
First off the labels can be, well, labeled. If you go up to your Finder preferences, you can click on ‘Labels’ which will allow you to name your labels whatever you want. This comes in handy when you are in need of categorizing different items that may be in the same genre, but differ in name. Since I’m a designer, I use my labels for different types of design material.
As you can see, ‘other print material’ could fall under a broad category, but I know that anything orange is print, but not a business card, because business cards are green. If you forget what you named your labels, you can easily find out when you go to label something! If you right click a file/folder and hover over a color, the name of that label will appear below it, so there is no confusion as to what color goes with what label.
I took the color labels a bit further and named a folder that contained the described items. For instance, I would make a folder named Postcards, which would be labeled orange, and everything pertaining to the design of that postcard would be contained inside of that Postcard folder. This is much easier than trying to label individual files themselves, although in some cases I’m sure that would be necessary as well.
One last trick with labels. Lets say I have a root directory that somewhere nested in it has 52 folders that are labeled orange for ‘other print material’. If the names of the folders were all the same, I could just search in spotlight the name of the folder and be shown a list of all of them. But, since ‘other print material’ could have folders named letterhead, postcard, envelope and more, I have to index these files by their color label. This is done by typing into spotlight label:1, where 1 specifies a color (gray in this case). The numbers are out of order, so here is a list for reference:
label:1 Gray
label:2 Green
label:3 Purple
label:4 Blue
label:5 Yellow
label:6 Red
label:7 Orange
By typing in one of these commands, you will index only the files and/or folders that have that color label associated with it.
When used correctly, labels can be a great help for organization of files, and can help prevent files from getting lost. Having files organzed well can help you become more efficient at your work by helping you find things faster, and also just looks good!
