Marketing Team File Structure

[HydraGlyphics]

Hello everyone!

I'm currently trying to figure out a solid file structure for my multi-media team. This involves 2 designers, 2 video producers / animators, 1 blog-writer, 1 marketing manager. The content that we produce vary from internal live events to external animation videos. I was thinking of separating each folder by projects with sub-folders with each individual department, but this would result in one super folder with hundreds of project folders inside of it. Any suggestions on how we can organize these folder to make it easy to navigate and easy to find specific files. How do you have your file structure laid out?

Sorry if this type of question doesn't belong here, I figure that it doesn't hurt to ask the community.
Thanks to everyone in advance!

[Avocado Diaboli]

While I can't give you a definitive folder structure that will perfectly work for your needs, I think it's important to mention another aspect you haven't touched upon that you should absolutely not ignore: Tags. Use tags for every kind of file you have.

 

Folders and their structures are nice ways compartmentalize your projects since they mimic their real world counterparts. But if you look at the real world, if you have a real physical folder for your project, that's just one single folder. But that one single folder is not useful if an entire team is working on the project contained in that folder, since only one single person can have access to the contents of the folder. Sure, you can take out pages, but then it's incomplete and that part of the missing information isn't accessible to the person in possession of the rest of the folder. And if you insist on keeping all the assets of every project in each project folder, you'll end up with a ton of duplicates. Maybe you want to reuse an image you used in project A in project B. But you can't expect every team member to know the location of every file by heart, so the "simplest" way if you insist on that folder paradigm is to make a copy and store each of those copies in every project folder that uses that image.

 

Since you don't work like that in the physical space, why would you want to replicate that in the digital space? That's where tags come in. With properly tagged files, it doesn't matter where they are located within your folder structure. Sure, it might look nice if you group all that stuff together, but is it really that much more efficient to work with? You just need a good file manager with a robust search function that can give you what you want. And most importantly: Be diligent when tagging your stuff. As an example: I don't separate my photos into folders anymore. I used to do that, grouped all the pictures I took at birthdays or vacations into individual folders. These days, I just dump them all into a single directory and tag them properly. Date, location, people in those photos, types of photos (landscape, architecture, portraits), moods, colors. Heck, most of those tags get included automatically these days. You can add as many tags as you want. And if you search for a single tag you get all the results served to you without having to navigate a folder structure.