After Effects Tip: Import and Export

I know this might not be what you come here to read, but I found ways to improve my import AND export process with After Effects today, and I'm as pleased as can be about it.

Import:

Got a folder full of stuff that you need to bring in? And you drag it in, and After Effects thinks those 10 differently-sized jpegs are supposed to be one shot or something?  Hold Alt while dragging into After Effects to import that folder as a folder. Miraculous!

Export:

Finished your work and need to render it out? But you clicked in a hurry and next thing you know your renders are in some other project on some other drive and god knows where? And now you're duplicating the render just to see where it might go?
Output templates to the rescue!
In the render queue, hit your dropdown triangle next to Output To: and choose custom. What you're going to do is set a path to something useful, save it, and set it as your default.

Here's how my 'Today's Renders' preset works:

[projectFolder]/../../50_Renders/[dateMonth][dateDay]/[compName].[fileextension]

In all of my projects, my After Effects project files live in [NAME OF PROJECT]/00_Projects/02_AEX, so we start there by default, go up two levels (".." is the path for the folder one level up in the hierarchy), go into 50_Renders, then create or go into the folder marked, let's say 1026 if it's October 26th, and make a file named after the comp we're rendering. 

Save that and set it to the default output. Now renders go where they go, and you're not drilling through folders ten times a day.

These may sound simple, or boring, but they made my day. Making the fundamental stuff you do constantly even a little bit easier is victory!