Workflow

How do you organize raw footage without losing your mind?

Organise by shoot date at ingest, never by subject, and never rename a camera original. Subject, location and scene are the things you will want to search by later, and they are exactly the things a folder tree cannot hold more than one of at a time.

Published September 10, 2026 · Field notes

This exact title appears in r/videography, r/filmmakers and r/weddingvideography, posted separately by different people. The question inside it is always the same four bullets: what folder structure, rename or rely on metadata, what habit do you wish you had started, and what is the biggest time sink. Here are four answers that hold up.

Ingest by date, because date is the only free attribute

A structure that works looks like this, and it is boring on purpose:

/Footage
  /2026
    /2026-04-18_harbour-wedding
      /01_camera-originals     <- never edited, never renamed
        /A_cam
        /B_cam
        /drone
      /02_audio
      /03_selects
      /04_exports
      shoot-notes.txt

The date comes first because it sorts correctly forever without any effort from you, and because it is the one thing the camera already knows. The slug after the date is for humans; keep it to two or three words. Everything below that is a fixed set of folders that never changes between shoots, so muscle memory does the filing rather than judgment.

The important line in that tree is 01_camera-originals. It is immutable. Nothing in it is renamed, trimmed, transcoded or deleted. Every other folder is derived and can be rebuilt. That single rule prevents the specific disaster where a relink fails in two years and nobody can tell which file is the original any more.

Do not organise by subject, however tempting

Subject-first trees fail for a structural reason rather than a discipline one: a clip has several subjects at once, and a folder can only hold it in one place. The wedding drone shot at golden hour over the harbour belongs under drone, under harbour, under golden-hour and under that client. You pick one, and the other three retrieval routes are gone.

This is the same failure described in the folder structure that stops working at about 500 clips, and it is why the answer to "what folder structure" is "a dull one, plus something else for subject".

Rename derivatives, never camera originals

Camera files are named by reel and clip - A001_C012, DJI_0431, GX010097 - and those names are not meaningless. They tie the file to the card it came off, they preserve shooting order, and NLEs use them when relinking. Rename them and you have destroyed the only machine-generated identity the file had, in exchange for a description that will be worded differently next month.

Selects and exports are different: you created them, so name them properly. The naming scheme that survives is covered separately in naming conventions for footage.

The two fields worth typing

Manual logging fails because it is per-clip work with a delayed payoff. Two exceptions are worth it because they are per-shoot work:

• A shoot-notes text file, written the same day, in the shoot folder. Half a page: what the job was, who was there, what went wrong, which cards are which. It costs five minutes and it is the only artifact that still explains the day three years later.
• Ratings on the takes you actually used. Not a keyword taxonomy - just a star on the clips that made the cut. When you come back for B-roll, the used takes are the ones worth seeing first, and you already know they are good because you shipped them.

Everything more elaborate than that - controlled vocabularies, per-clip descriptions, colour-coded label schemes - has the same failure mode: it works for two shoots and then quietly stops, and a half-maintained taxonomy is worse than none, because you cannot trust a negative result.

The biggest time sink is not filing, it is retrieval

People answering these threads consistently report the same thing: filing takes minutes per shoot, and finding takes an hour per edit. One poster in r/newtubers put it as spending "almost an hour scrubbing through random folders" for a single remembered B-roll clip. That ratio is the argument for spending your effort on an index rather than on a taxonomy.

An index does the subject axis that folders cannot: it looks at each clip and lets you retrieve by what is in the picture, without you having filed it under anything. That is what Reelary does - it points at your existing folders, never moves or renames a file, and adds a search layer over the top. The structure above stays exactly as it is; nothing about it needs to change to make it searchable.

The habit worth starting

If you adopt exactly one thing from this: write the shoot-notes file on the day, in the shoot folder, and never rename a camera original. Those two habits cost almost nothing and they are the two whose absence is unrecoverable later. Folder structure you can migrate; a lost original and a forgotten day you cannot.

Questions people ask about this

Should I organise footage by date or by subject?

By date, at ingest. Date is written by the camera, is never ambiguous and never needs renaming later. Subject is what you will search by, but a clip usually has several subjects, and a folder can only put it in one place - so subject belongs in metadata or an index, not in the folder tree.

Should I rename camera original files?

No. Renaming camera originals breaks the reel and clip numbering that ties a file back to the card, and it breaks relinking in every NLE if the rename happens after a project is built. Add a prefix at the folder level instead, and put descriptive names on exports and selects, which are files you own rather than files the camera made.

What metadata is worth typing by hand?

Two fields: a shoot slug that says what the day was, and a star rating or a keyword on the takes you actually used. Both survive because they are short, both are typed once per shoot rather than once per clip, and both stay meaningful in three years.

Related

• Naming conventions for footage: what actually survives three years
• The folder structure that stops working at about 500 clips
• Why your Premiere bins don't help you next year