Please Name Your Damn Files: A Photographer's Guide to Exhibition File Naming

The naming convention, the image requirements, and the small administrative mistakes that slow down an exhibition submission.

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Short answer. When a prospectus does not specify a format, name every file ArtistName_Title.jpg. No spaces, no version numbers, no camera output. That single change prevents confusion and reduces the chance that somebody has to track you down by email before your entry can be reviewed.

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The convention

ArtistName_Title.jpg

Examples:

JessicaFiume_RideHome.jpg
JohnMorris_VoyagesEnd.jpg
RebeccaSkinner_FadedFootsteps.jpg

The rules behind it:

• No spaces. Use nothing or underscores. Spaces break in some systems and become %20 in others.
• No version numbers. _v9, _final, _FINAL2, _REALfinal all tell us about your afternoon, not about your photograph.
• No camera output. IMG_4471.jpg and DSC_0394.jpg identify nobody.
• No processing history. 170305_Kolkop_9933-HDR_DNAI_SHAI_lvl_ClrLum_HSH_Radiance_Tritone_TCP-Texture-38.jpg is a real filename we received. It is a technical diary. It is not a name.
• Series work: add a number at the end. RebeccaSkinner_FadedFootsteps_01.jpg, _02, _03. Keep the same title across the series so the images stay together when sorted.
• Punctuation: hyphens and underscores only. Skip apostrophes, ampersands, slashes, colons, and quotation marks. VoyagesEnd rather than Voyage'sEnd.

If your name uses characters outside the basic Latin alphabet

Use your name as you spell it. If a form rejects it, that is our problem and we want to know about it, so tell us rather than anglicizing yourself to satisfy a text field.

If the platform accepts a transliterated filename but not your name as written, use the transliteration only in the filename and enter your name correctly in the artist name field. The artist field is what gets published. The filename is administrative. Your credit should read the way you wrote it.

Image specifications

These are the defaults when a prospectus does not state otherwise.

Requirement	Spec
Format	JPG or JPEG
Minimum longest edge	1200 pixels
Minimum file size	500 KB when possible
Watermarks	Not accepted unless the prospectus says otherwise

Individual open calls may set different requirements. When the prospectus and this page disagree, the prospectus wins.

Two failure modes we see constantly, now that you know the target:

Too small. A JPEG a few hundred pixels wide, compressed until the detail turns to soup. It is technically an image in roughly the way a gas station hot dog is technically food. If a curator cannot see what you did, a curator cannot evaluate what you did.

Too large. A very large TIFF exported straight out of Photoshop, usually an HDR, of a photograph that would have looked identical at a tenth the size. Somebody then has to download it and resize it by hand before anyone can look at it. It does not make the image more impressive. It makes it slower to reach a curator.

Watermarks

Unless a prospectus specifically permits them, watermarked images may be disqualified. Submission files are working files, not published files. If a curator spends longer looking at your watermark than your photograph, the watermark has become the subject of the photograph, and that is not the outcome either of us wanted.

Why any of this matters

Submission requirements can feel fussy. At TCG, the point is logistics.

Before a curator sees your photograph, somebody has to process your entry. The first thing they encounter is not your statement, your CV, or the award you won in 2009. It is a filename, an image, and a set of metadata fields. If those three things are in order, your work moves straight into review. If they are not, somebody has to stop, investigate, email you, wait, and update the record.

One correction is small. The problem is accumulation. When many entries each need one small repair, those repairs arrive during the same narrow production window. The delay is not caused by one artist. It is caused by dozens of unrelated corrections landing at once.

No, we do not just reject everything with an error

We are occasionally advised to simply disqualify any submission containing a mistake. It sounds efficient. It is not something we are willing to do.

Artists make mistakes. Administrators make mistakes. Curators make mistakes. We have made every mistake on this page ourselves at some point, usually at an inconvenient hour. A minor, correctable error does not automatically disqualify the work. An unusable file or unresolved missing information still can.

What it costs is time, and time is the thing an independent gallery has least of. We would rather spend it looking at photographs.

The checklist

Before you submit anything, anywhere, to us or to anyone else:

• Files named ArtistName_Title.jpg, or the format the prospectus specifies
• Series images numbered consistently
• No spaces, version numbers, or punctuation beyond hyphens and underscores
• Image within the size and format specs
• No watermark unless the prospectus allows one
• Title, dimensions, and medium entered when requested
• Name, email, and sale information entered and spelled correctly
• Correct image uploaded, confirmed by opening it one final time

That last one is not a joke. Some of the corrections we handle are artists who named the file perfectly and attached the wrong photograph.

Before you submit

Read the prospectus for the specific call. Requirements differ between exhibitions, and the prospectus overrides anything on this page.

Then go look at what is open: current open calls. If something here is unclear, the artist FAQ covers most of it, and if it does not, ask us. We would rather answer a question before a deadline than fix a record after one.

And if you are wondering where your entry fee goes while you are at it, we wrote that down too.

Name your files. A minute now can save a round of email later.