Remote teams live on shared files. Contracts, screenshots, slide exports, scanned receipts and product photos move between people all day. When file habits are sloppy, small problems pile up: emails bounce because attachments are too big, people review the wrong version, and confidential documents end up on random websites. After a few years of remote work, our team settled on a handful of habits that remove most of this friction.

1. Agree on formats

Decide as a team which formats you use for what. Our simple rules: PDF for anything that should look fixed, such as contracts, reports and invoices; PNG for screenshots with text; JPG or WebP for photos; and the original source file kept in shared storage for anything still being edited. Clear defaults prevent endless "I can't open this" messages.

2. Compress before you share

A screenshot from a high-resolution monitor can be several megabytes, and product photos straight from a camera can be ten times that.…