Naming and organising footage so submission is not miserable

Four hundred files come off three cards with names like A102_C020_0822TW_001.mov. They are meaningless, they sort strangely, and the temptation is immediate: rename them all to something you can read.

Do not. That instinct is the one that causes the problems.

Good news if you already have folders full of camera-named files: that is the exact shape MetaMule expects to work on. See how it reads a folder as-is.

Camera filenames are the only stable identifier you have

That ugly string is unique, was generated at the moment of capture, and matches what is in the camera's own metadata, your backup, and any project file that has ever referenced the clip.

The moment you rename to heron-takeoff-3.mov, you have created a name that is meaningful to you today and untraceable to everything else. Then you shoot another heron. Then you reshoot the same location. Now heron-takeoff-3 exists twice, in different folders, and neither one matches the card it came from.

Keep the camera names. Put the meaning in the folder, not the file.

One folder per shoot, named for what it was

The folder is where the human-readable information belongs, because there is one of them rather than four hundred:

2026-08-22 Melbourne Cove - herons
2026-08-24 Cocoa Beach - dawn surf
2026-09-01 Salt Flats - timelapse

Date first, in year-month-day, so the folder list sorts chronologically without any effort. Location and subject after it, in whatever words you would actually use to search your own disk in two years.

That single convention answers most of the questions you will ever ask of your archive: what did I shoot, when, and where.

The things that need recording are shoot facts, not file facts

The information a marketplace wants that is not in the file itself is almost always true of the whole shoot rather than any one clip:

• Where it was: city, region, country
• When it was shot
• Whether anyone in it has a release
• Who gets the credit line

Record those once, at the folder level. Writing the same location into four hundred files by hand is not organisation, it is data entry, and it is where mistakes get in. MetaMule treats a folder as a shoot for exactly this reason: set the location, release status and credit once and it carries down to every clip.

The exceptions are per-clip and few: which clips actually contain a releasable person, and anything where one clip genuinely differs from the rest of the shoot.

Do not reorganise around marketplaces

A tempting structure is a folder per destination: everything for Getty here, everything for Pond5 there. It falls apart immediately, because most clips go to several places and you end up either duplicating files or maintaining a map of what went where.

Organise by shoot, which never changes. Export per marketplace, which changes constantly. The export is a product of the folder, not a way of storing it.

Back up before you submit, not after

Submission is the point where files get moved, transcoded, renamed by well-meaning tools, and occasionally deleted by you at two in the morning. It is also the point where the folder is finally complete.

Back up the folder in the state you would want to return to: original files, original names, and whatever metadata you have attached. If a marketplace rejects a batch in six months and asks for a re-upload, that is the thing you will need.

The short version

• Keep camera filenames. They are unique, traceable, and match everything else.
• One folder per shoot, named YYYY-MM-DD Location - subject.
• Put shoot-level facts (location, date, releases, credit) at the folder level, once.
• Only release status genuinely varies clip by clip.
• Organise by shoot, not by marketplace. Exports are outputs, not storage.
• Back up when the folder is complete, which is just before you submit.