Why Good File Names Follow MLA Formatting

Oftentimes people abandon good writing skills when it comes to file names. Then they start doing weird things like capitalizing everything, or just certain parts. You know the files I mean: FINAL_Final_v2.mov. LOGO NEW alt (3).ai. Poster_For_The_Festival_Of_Lights_USE THIS ONE.psd.

A designer who would never send a deck with random capitals might still save forty files that way. The same editor who obsesses over title cards will name a sequence in a way they couldn't read back six months later.

My position is simple: in most cases, a good file name should follow MLA formatting. Not because MLA is sacred, but because it's a well-tested, widely taught set of rules for writing titles, dates and names consistently. That's exactly the problem file naming has. We don't need to invent a new grammar. We need to stop throwing out the one we already have.

To be clear, this is my recommendation, not the only right answer. A good naming convention is whatever your studio decides on and then uses every time. MLA is just a strong place to start. (For the broader principles, see our file naming best practices guide.)

Why Writing Rules Go Out the Window

File names get written in a hurry, at the end of a task, by someone who is already thinking about the next one. Nobody proofreads them. So they pick up habits that would never survive in a sentence.

• ALL CAPS as emphasis. FINAL, APPROVED, DO NOT USE. Caps are a way of shouting at your future self. They carry no information that a version number or a folder couldn't carry better, and they make everything around them harder to read.

• Random capitalization. FINAL_Final_v2 has three different ideas of what a capital letter means in one name. Some people capitalize every word, some capitalize the "important" part, some capitalize whatever their Caps Lock happened to be doing.

• Inconsistent abbreviations. The same project shows up as "Holiday," "Hol," "HLDY" and "xmas." One editor writes "rev," another "R," another "v." Search breaks, sorting breaks, and nobody can guess the right name without opening the folder.

• Status words instead of structure. "final," "new," "latest," "real" and "use this" all go stale the moment another version exists. Then you get FINAL_Final.

None of this is a technology problem. It's a writing problem. And writing problems have writing solutions.

What Carries Over from MLA

MLA style is a guide for writing and citing sources. This guide follows its 9th edition. Most of us learned it in school and then forgot it applied anywhere else. Four of its conventions map cleanly onto file names.

1. Title-Case Capitalization

MLA capitalizes titles in a specific, predictable way:

• Capitalize the first word and the last word, no matter what they are.

• Capitalize all principal words: nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and subordinating conjunctions (like "Because," "If" and "When").

• Lowercase articles (a, an, the), prepositions (of, in, for, to, between, under and so on), coordinating conjunctions (and, but, for, nor, or, so, yet) and the "to" in infinitives when they fall in the middle of a title.

• Capitalize the first word of a subtitle.

One detail worth getting right: some style guides lowercase only short prepositions. MLA 9 lowercases prepositions regardless of length, so it's "Notes from Underground" and "Walking between Worlds," not "Walking Between Worlds." Most prepositions in file names are short anyway, but if you're adopting MLA, adopt the actual rule.

Applied to a file, Poster_For_The_Festival_Of_Lights becomes Poster-for-the-Festival-of-Lights. The important words stand out. The connecting words recede. Your eye finds the meaning faster, which is the whole point of capitalization in the first place.

2. A Consistent Date Style

MLA doesn't let you write dates however you feel that day. In a works-cited list, dates go day-month-year, with longer month names abbreviated: 21 Oct. 2026. The deeper rule is consistency: pick one style and use it everywhere. That rule carries over completely. The exact format doesn't, and I'll get to why below.

3. Standard Abbreviations

MLA uses a short, fixed set of abbreviations (ed. for edition or editor, vol. for volume, no. for number, et al. for "and others") and expects you to use them the same way every time. It also drops periods in abbreviations made of capital letters, so it's US, not U.S., and DVD, not D.V.D.

The lesson for file names: keep a short list of approved abbreviations and use only those. "v" for version. "Cam" for camera. Standard capital-letter abbreviations like VFX, SFX, 4K or US, written the way the industry writes them. Everything else gets spelled out. If two people on your team would abbreviate a word differently, spell it out.

4. Author, Then Title, Then Details

An MLA works-cited entry follows a fixed order of core elements: author, title of the source, then container and publication details such as version, number, publisher and date. You always know where to look for each piece.

File names benefit from the same fixed order. For creative work, the "author" is usually the client or brand, the title is the project and deliverable, and the details are version and date:

Client_Project_Deliverable_Version_Date

Like a bibliography, a folder full of files named this way sorts itself by who, then what, then which one. You stop guessing.

Before and After

These examples use a sample client, Acme Company, with the client code ACM (its project folder would be ACM_AcmeCompany).

Look at what changed. Caps only where MLA would put them. No status words; the version number does that job. One date format. Every name reads in the same order. And notice that "rev B," "v2" and "FINAL" all collapsed into a single, sortable version field.

Where File Systems Force a Departure

This is the "in most cases" part. MLA was designed for pages, not for the Finder, servers and render queues. A few adaptations aren't optional, and pretending otherwise just produces broken files.

Separators Replace Spaces and Punctuation

Spaces cause trouble in scripts, command lines, URLs and some pipeline tools. Colons, slashes, question marks and quotation marks are reserved or forbidden on one operating system or another. So MLA's punctuation has to go, and something has to take its place.

The convention I recommend: underscores between fields, hyphens between words. The underscore does the job a period or comma does in a citation, marking where one element ends and the next begins. The hyphen does the job of a space. Title case still applies inside each field, so The-Sound-of-the-City keeps its lowercase "of" and "the." That's the MLA rule surviving the trip.

If your team prefers spaces and your tools handle them, fine. Just pick one and apply it consistently.

ISO Dates Instead of Day-Month-Year

MLA's "21 Oct. 2026" is great on a page and terrible in a folder. Sorted by name, day-first dates scatter across the list, and month abbreviations sort alphabetically (Apr., Aug., Dec.) instead of chronologically. The period in "Oct." is also one more piece of punctuation in a file name.

Use ISO 8601 instead: YYYY-MM-DD, as in 2026-10-21. Year first, zero-padded months and days. It sorts correctly every time, it reads the same in every country, and it keeps the part of the MLA rule that matters most: one date style, used consistently.

Zero-Padded Numbers

Same logic for versions and shot numbers. In plain alphabetical sorting, which plenty of servers, scripts and tools still use, v10 lands before v2. v02 and v10 sort correctly everywhere. Decide how many digits you need and pad to that. The lowercase "v" is a practical exception to title case. It's an approved abbreviation, used identically every time, which is exactly what MLA asks of an abbreviation.

Other Legitimate Exceptions

• Web and code assets. Files headed for a website or codebase often need to be all lowercase, because servers are frequently case-sensitive and URLs are easier to manage that way. Follow the destination's rules.

• Client or broadcaster specs. If a deliverable spec dictates a naming format, the spec wins. Use your own convention for everything internal.

• Application-generated files. Render caches, autosaves and proxies named by software can stay as they are. Name what people name.

The rule underneath all of these: depart from your convention only when the file system, the destination or the client gives you a concrete reason. "It looked important, so I capitalized it" is not a reason.

A Short File Naming Checklist

1. Use a fixed field order: Client_Project_Deliverable_Version_Date.

2. Apply MLA title case inside each field. Capitalize first, last and principal words. Lowercase articles, prepositions and coordinating conjunctions in the middle.

3. No ALL CAPS, except standard capital-letter abbreviations like VFX or US.

4. Underscores between fields, hyphens between words. No other punctuation.

5. Dates as YYYY-MM-DD, always.

6. Versions as zero-padded numbers (v01, v02). Never "final," "new" or "latest."

7. Keep a short, written list of approved abbreviations. Spell out everything else.

8. Depart from the convention only for a concrete technical or client requirement.

If you work in motion, see our file naming convention for motion designers. To build out folders alongside your names, try the file naming and folder structure course.

Making It Stick

None of this is hard. The hard part is doing it every time, across every person on a team, at the end of a long day. That's why I built Prisma Scanner.

Prisma Scanner is a local-first file-naming and folder-structure app for Mac. In its Hub, you set your own naming and folder rules, whether that's MLA-style title case or something entirely different. Good is whatever you decide. The free Scanner shows where your current names break good practice. Then the Prisma plugins for Adobe® After Effects®, Adobe® Premiere® Pro, Adobe® Photoshop®, Adobe® Illustrator® and Figma, and the Prisma extension for Google Chrome™, suggest names that follow those rules for you to copy, and one-click Apply rename is on the paid Creator and Studio plans. Want to see where you stand today? Run your names through the free Prisma Scanner.

But whether you use a tool or a shared doc and some discipline, the principle is the same: write your file names like you'd write anything else that matters.

Adobe, After Effects, Premiere Pro, Photoshop and Illustrator are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe in the United States and/or other countries. Figma is a trademark of Figma, Inc. Google Chrome is a trademark of Google LLC. Mac, macOS and Finder are trademarks of Apple Inc. MLA is a trademark of the Modern Language Association. Prisma is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Adobe, Figma, Google or Apple.