Force Simple File Names goes beyond replacing spaces — it normalises every filename to a strict ASCII-safe slug. Useful when files are exposed via URLs, accessed from legacy systems, or stored on filesystems that struggle with unicode.
What It Does
When the setting is on, every upload's filename is:
- Transliterated from unicode to ASCII (é → e, ñ → n, ß → ss).
- Lower-cased (optional).
- Stripped of special characters except alphanumerics, dot and the chosen separator.
- Spaces and underscores collapsed to a single separator (typically hyphen).
- Truncated to a max length (typically 100 characters).
- Suffixed with a short hash if a collision would occur in the destination directory.
Configuration Options
- Case: Preserve, lower-case, or upper-case.
- Separator: Hyphen (URL-friendly) or underscore.
- Max length: Default 100; longer is fine for internal-only files.
- Transliteration target: ASCII (most compatible) or Latin-1.
Worked Examples
- Public CDN: All filenames lower-case, hyphen separator, max 80 chars. URLs are clean and predictable.
- FTP integration with legacy ERP: ASCII-only, upper-case, no special characters at all. Compatible with mainframe filename rules.
- End-user file library: Off — users want to see their original filenames in the file picker.
Tip: Always keep the original filename in a display field. The user uploaded “Photo of my Dog 🐕.jpg” and expects to see that exact text — they don't care that the backing storage uses photo-of-my-dog.jpg.