Shooting video is more convenient and accessible than most of us could have dreamed even a few years ago, making it tempting to clutter up your computer and smartphone with clips of family vacations, videos of your dog eating bugs (guilty as charged), and other slices of life. You should want to keep them all and edit them into short films that you’ll want to share or just re-watch yourself. That’s what they’re for! But you shouldn’t toss them all willy-nilly onto your computer’s desktop.

Video files pose unique organizational challenges. For starters, they’re much larger most other files types, so where you store them and how frequently you archive them matters. Second, you probably remember what’s in your video files in a very different way than you remember or think about other kinds of files, such as a PowerPoint presentation. When you go to retrieve a presentation file, your brain will remember the client, or the conference where you presented it, or maybe even the quarter in which you delivered the presentation (if it’s related to financial results, for instance). When you want to find a video clip, however, you might recall who is in the video, or the holiday when you shot it, or that it was a scene outdoors. How you think about your files matters tremendously when it comes to organizing them in an effective way.

I spoke with a few video professionals to get a sense of how they organize their clips, from naming the files and adding tags to archiving the files themselves. Learn from the pros as you clean up your digital video files.

Getting Started Organizing Your Videos
To organize your video files, it’s important to understand just how many copies of videos you are likely to have.

For starters, there are the raw files. Raw files are the unedited videos you’ve shot. They typically stay on your video-recording device until your transfer them to a computer or other storage location.

Second, when you import your videos into a video editing software program, you’ll want to make sure you select the option (or adjust the settings) to create a copy of the raw file. Making a copy at this stage ensures that your original raw files remain unedited as your true first copy, which you might want to save.

Third, you’ll have all the assets you’re going to join together to make a final, produced video. This batch of files will include graphics, voice-over audio, still images, in addition to the clips from your footage that you plan to use.

Finally, you’ll have your final edited video.

Note: Video editing programs use a wide variety of terminology to describe these many stages of video editing. I’m specifically avoiding program-specific terms here, such as Bin, Sequence, Project, and Event Library, to minimize confusion.

For recreational (as opposed to professional) videographers, you’ll want to take care to organize the raw footage and the final edited video. These are likely the two most important types of video files. You’ll want the raw footage on hand in case you ever want to make other videos from it, and you’ll want the final edited video because, well, it’s the culmination of your work and the thing you’re most likely to share.

For all the other file types in between, most recreational videographers can simply rely on the default settings in their video editing program.

Digitize Old Footage
Some households have stacks of old, non-digital footage. If you’re organizing and consolidating all your videos, you’ll want to digitize any VHS tapes or film you have.

There are a number of services, such as YesVideo(Opens in a new window) and iDigitize(Opens in a new window), that specialize in converting non-digital video to digital. Some services give you the option of transferring the old footage onto DVDs or hosting it in an online storage space. Whichever option you choose, just be sure you make a backup of all the files, too. More on archiving and backing up a little later.

Get Your Videos Off Your Phone—And Fast!
If you’re typically shooting videos on your phone, transfer them to your computer and delete them from your phone. Video files eat up a lot of space, so it’s better to keep them on a computer that has much more space to spare than a mobile device. It’s also safer on a computer; if you lose your phone and those videos aren’t backed up, they’re gone for good.

Slackers—those of you who won’t heed this advice out of laziness or procrastination or whatever other excuse you have—here’s a trick just for you: Start using SugarSync because it’s mobile app has an automatic backup feature for not only photos but also videos. The SugarSync app can automatically save all your videos directly to your SugarSync account, and then sync them to you computers as well.

Needless to say, if you’re shooting with a dedicated video camera, you’ll also want to move your footage off the device and onto your computer, where you can back it up, quickly.

Name Your Files With YRMODA
When I talked to PCMag’s video editor, Chris Snyder, to ask how he organizes his files, I had to contain my excitement when he opened his screen and I noticed how he named his video files and folders. Why? Because the six-digit number system he uses is almost exactly the same one I use for all my file names. I use year-month-date (YRMODA) and Snyder uses the American standard month-day-year.

“You know,” he said, “I should probably rename them with year, month, day so that the files are chronological.” Yup! I couldn’t agree more.

As an example of how this convention works, video footage from my family’s fourth of July vacation this year to New Paltz would start with 140704. It breaks down like this:

• 14 is for the year 2014,
• 07 is for the seventh month, July,
• 04 translates to the day.

I would probably add some more keywords after that to help me remember, resulting in a final file name like: 140704_NewPaltzTrip. Alternatively, 140704_NewPaltzTrip might be the name I use for a folder where I’ll put all my related videos. That way, I can name the files a little more specifically, such as 140705_NewPaltz_birthday and 140704_NewPaltz_fireworks.

If you don’t shoot a lot of videos in a given month, you can even get away with a four-digit year-month (YRMO) only. For example, 1407_NewPaltzTrip still conveys plenty of information for my needs.

The YRMODA system is amazingly convenient and efficient if you remember your videos in terms of when you shot them. Even if it’s an event, you can probably remember that your sister’s gradation was in May 2011 (which translates to 1105) and that 2009 Thanksgiving footage will be in one of the videos starting 0911. So what do you do if you remember your files by something other than date or event?

All that really matters is that you come up with a system that you like, that’s easy to remember, and that fits the way you think about your data. I’d also suggest making sure your system results in unique files names so you don’t end up overwriting files accidentally.

Use Folders, and Add Tags and Keywords
Michael Chang, CEO of YesVideo, says some video digitizing services automatically tag your videos by date or location. If the service you use doesn’t do that, take the time to organize the files into folders at the very least. If you have a lot of footage, you probably don’t want to rename every single file, so instead, put them into larger category folders. I recommend naming these folders something like 1996_videos and 1997_videos.

Adding tags to your videos helps tremendously if you have a lot of footage and you frequently slice together different videos.

“Tagging or annotation is a key component, especially when it comes to personal videos being preserved as one’s legacy,” Chang told me. “Thanks to ever-evolving software, you can now create a video scrapbook which can be wonderful ways to organize your videos.”

While my inclination would be to use tags that describe the content of the video itself (“grandma,” “soccer game,” “boat”), Synder mentions that it helps to include words that point to the type of asset, such as “b-roll” and “audio,” too.

Add these tags at the same time you upload your videos, while the footage is fresh in your mind. Doing so is much more efficient than rewatching your videos later to remind yourself what’s in them and add tags.

Archive and Store Videos Finished Elsewhere
When you’re finished editing your videos, you’ll typically export the final file. If you upload it to Facebook, YouTube, or some other site, that copy can be considered one of your backups, which is good. You always want a backup of your files.

But if you’re posting some videos to YouTube and saving others to a private Dropbox account, your video files are going to be all over the place.

A better method is to always export your final videos locally when you’re done making them. Hopefully you regularly backup your computer, so those files should be safe. But video files take up a lot of space, so eventually you’ll want to move them all to an external hard drive, cloud storage solution, or other storage space of your choice.

Chang of YesVideo likes cloud storage best. “We absolutely recommend moving all your videos, old and new, to the cloud. Every year, thousands of pieces of media are destroyed in floods, fires, and other natural disasters. If those memories weren’t saved online anywhere, they are lost forever,” Chang said.

He sees no harm in taking advantage of as many services as you can. For his own files, Chang says he uses Amazon Cloud Drive, Dropbox, and Google Drive.

If you’re going the multi-cloud storage route, try to compartmentalize, for example, using Dropbox only for business-related videos, but Google for home videos. That way, you’ll remember where to go to find your files when you want to retrieve them.

Shoot a Lot? Keep a Separate Record
Consider yourself a semi-pro video creator? Start keeping a separate record of what you shoot. Snyder finds that his YRMODA system is highly effective in part because he uses another database to schedule shoots. Anytime he needs to find video from a particular shoot, he can look up the date in the database before he starts browsing his files.

You don’t need a hefty database. Even a simple spreadsheet cataloging the shoot date, subject, environment, and any other details would certainly go a long way to helping you find all your files in an efficient manner.

A Three-Step Plan
To recap, organizing your non-professional videos really comes down three steps:

• centralizing your video files (that is, getting them off your smartphone and video camera),
• naming them intelligently and tagging them so you know what they contain, and
• backing up and archiving your final edited files.

For more tips and reviews of video-editing software and apps, see our Video Editing page.