okay so this is embarrassing but i have like 4 months of drone footage sitting across three different hard drives and i genuinely cannot find anything. i went out last weekend to get some sunset stuff over the lake near my house and i wanted to reference some shots i got from the same spot in spring and it took me 45 minutes just to find the clips. by then the light was gone obivously

i use davinci resolve and im decent in there but i never set up any real folder structure when i started and now its just chaos. date folders with names like "drone stuff 2" and "test flights march" and i dont even know whats in half of them without opening every single one

do you keep a separate catalog? do you tag things by location or shot type or what. i feel like i need to just start over but thats months of footage to go back through. does anyone use any software specifically for this or just a good folder system that actually works

ive just got a simple folder system that works for me, location then date inside that. so like top level is places, inside that "lake district" or whatever, then inside that folders by date. anything that doesnt have a clear location gets dumped in a "misc" folder that i clean out every month or so. not fancy but i can always find stuff in under a minute

the bigger thing that helped was doing a quick rename of files right after every flight while its fresh. i use a free tool called bulk rename utility and just add the location and a short descriptor to the front of the filename. takes 5 mins after a session and saves so much pain later. resolve's media management is also pretty solid if you want to consolidate everything into one place, just be careful it doesnt duplicate everything and eat your drive space

eagle to the rescue lol. no but seriously Adobe Bridge is underrated for this if you dont mind it being a bit clunky. you can rate and tag clips without importing them anywhere and the preview is fast enough for drone footage. i know youre on resolve but you can still use bridge just for organizing and then pull into resolve from there

also dont stress about going back through old footage all at once. i just do like 20 mins whenever im waiting for a render or something, slowly getting through backlog that way. the important thing is to not let it get worse from here lol