Today, we’re launching our free website to make better filenames that are clear, consistent, and searchable: Filename Tool: https://filenametool.com. It’s a browser-based tool with no logins, no subscriptions, no ads. It's free to use as much as you want. Your data doesn’t leave your machine.

We’re a digital production company in the Bay Area and we initially made this just for ourselves. But we couldn’t find anything else like it, so we polished it up and decided to share. It’s not a batch renamer — instead, it builds filenames one at a time, either from scratch, from a filename you paste in, or from a file you drag onto it.

The tool is opinionated; it follows our carefully considered naming conventions. It quietly strips out illegal characters and symbols that would break syncing or URLs. There's a workflow section for taking a filename for original photographs, through modification, output, and the web. There’s a logging section for production companies to record scene/take/location information that travels with the file. There's a set of flags built into the tool and you can easily create custom ones that persist in your browser.

There's a lot of documentation (arguably too much), but the docs stay out of the way unless you need them. There are plenty of sample filenames that you copy and paste into the tool to explore its features. The tool is fast, too. Most changes happen instantly.

We lean on it every day, and we’re curious to see if it also earns a spot in your toolkit. Try it, break it, tell us what other conventions should be supported, or what doesn’t feel right. Filenaming is a surprisingly contentious subject; this is our contribution to the debate.