251–255 of 255 posts
c:\work for work-related things, subfolder for each project.
Listary (and other app launchers previously) have made it easier to jump around without caring where a folder is.
Slightly OT, but I yesterday launched my script [1] to go through 2 decades of family photos (200GB) that are structured in no sensible way (i.e tree depth of over 6 and over 500 folder with no descriptive names) and organize them. The script will copy the files, ignoring duplicates, and format them as follows. Files are renamed to their date of creation (when the photo/video was taken/shot), e.g. 2019.01.07_08.28.34…
I reduced the total running time of ~60 hours to ~3 hours by connecting my PC and my server directly with an ethernet cable :)
Stuff like bills and receipts I don't usually download, I just keep copies in my email archives and purge old ones once a year or so.
I keep everything that's pending review in ~/downloads, even if it's not a download, because my home folder is a bit cluttered with dotfiles and I like to keep hidden files visible. I don't use a desktop folder so this is my equivalent to what many people use their desktops for.
My pictures are generally just in folders with a date and meaningful name like "2018-11-FL-Vacation".
Music is just all piled into one folder since my car's USB reader can only read from the top-level folder and I mostly download stuff to listen to in the car.
By the way, since you mentioned PDFs, a handy tool to use is pdfgrep (https://pdfgrep.org/) to do text searches of PDF documents. I also use the 'locate' command a lot to quickly find files by filename/directory.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in a similar boat, and I'll mention one "weird trick" that has helped me. What used to happen was I'd download, say, an Ubuntu image, use it, and then say "... I might need this again" and leave it there. Then a week goes by, I've forgotten its there. Sorting by Date Added its now piled under 10 other items. The empire of dirt grows... The trick? A Trash that automatically empties items older than 30 days. MacOS…
Win10 makes it easy to automatically empty the Recycle Bin and Downloads (but sadly, not other locations). One major PITA is that Firefox does not use the standard Downloads folder/directory, but has its own. It's configurable, of course, but I never remember until I've already got a zillion things in it, and I try to run everything with a minimum of customization.
In about:config, set 'browser.download.lastDir.savePerSite' to false (you may have to create the preference), set 'browser.download.useDownloadDir' to true, and set 'browser.download.lastDir' to your preferred location.
More info - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/887248