A good way to catalog and organize footage you already shot

StoryFolder — 2026-09-02

Part of: How to log footage without tagging every clip by hand

Last updated: 2 September 2026.

You've got terabytes of B-roll spread across drives, some of it on a Mac, some on a PC, and no way to search any of it beyond scrolling filenames and hoping you remember what's inside them. Before picking a tool: what are you actually trying to find, a file, a shot inside a video, or an asset three people need to see at once? Those are three different jobs, three different categories of software, and picking the wrong one is why so many attempts at "organizing footage" stall out after a weekend.

If several people on different machines need to see and update the same catalogue of files sitting on shared or offline storage, that's not something this page can promise StoryFolder handles. A shared, multi-workstation drive catalogue is a real job and it deserves a tool built for it, which StoryFolder currently is not. What StoryFolder does well is the layer most catalogue tools skip: once you've picked a video, finding a specific shot inside it, searchable, without watching the whole thing again.

New in 0.4. The library gains collections for hand-picked shots across videos, quick filters for the searches you rerun, and video-level metadata fields. How the three fit together.

What kind of footage catalogue do you actually need?

Match the question you're actually asking to the tool that answers it.

Four layers, and most people need two. A file catalogue answers which drive a file is on. A media asset manager adds shared storage, proxies and permissions. Your NLE's bins organize the project you're cutting now. A shot index answers which shot, inside a video you already found. That one is StoryFolder.

Terabytes across Mac and PC with several workstations is a multi-part problem: the first three rows are where the files live and who can see them, and the fourth, the part covered here, is what's inside one video you've already found.

What should you catalog about each shot?

Fields shaped like your business.

The ones real customers build are Client, Job#, Location and Find in Folder (board-wide facts typed once), alongside shot-level judgements like B-ROLL, Content Type, Talent Name and, on one account, a field they named Animation.Nobody in StoryFolder's customer data built a field called objects or scene type, which is what a generic tagger hands you: a vocabulary that describes the picture instead of the job it came from, and that you then have to translate every time you search.

A new library ships with a starter category called My Notes: twelve text fields built for taking a film apart critically, not for cataloguing client work. Those are ours, not something any customer invented, and they're worth deleting or ignoring if what you're building is a footage catalogue rather than a film-studies exercise.

How can AI help without filling the catalogue with generic tags?

Only if you give it your categories first.

Create a small closed schema (a Content Type Dropdown with the options that matter to you, a B-ROLL checkbox) and switch on AI Autofill for just those fields. A Dropdown answer has to be one of the options you defined; it's checked against that list twice before anything gets written, so the model can't introduce a category you didn't create. You can start a run from the library's shot inspector or the editor's, and both open the same modal. A run is still scoped to one video either way.

Custom fields and AI Autofill both need StoryFolder Pro, and a run sends one frame per shot to StoryFolder's server, which calls a third-party vision model. Transcription is the other case; that one runs on your own machine.

That control is over vocabulary, not correctness. A valid category can still be the wrong one for a given shot, which is worth knowing before you trust a run unreviewed. Tag and Text fields are the exception to the closed-vocabulary story: they're deliberately open, so a Tag field can gain a tag you never listed, and a Text field will accept anything at all.

How do you make the catalogue useful to another person?

Through a search, an export, or a link.

Once shots are tagged, one search box covers the values in your Text, Number, Dropdown and Tag fields plus the transcript, in one pass, across your library, using plain substring matching rather than fuzzy matching. Rating and Checkbox fields are filter chips instead, so the B-ROLL checkbox above is a filter, not a search term. Pull the results out as a spreadsheet with the fields you choose, or publish a password-protected link for someone without the app, knowing that page is view-only and has no video player when the source is a local file. Where the same query keeps coming back, save it as a quick filter so the queue is a place you visit rather than a filter you rebuild; collections and quick filters are how a backlog stops being one long list.

That covers the moment a new hire needs to find footage they didn't shoot, or a client asks whether the b-roll from an old job still exists. It does not cover a live, shared, simultaneously-editable catalogue across a team. The handoff runs on export and republish: each person gets a snapshot of what was true when you sent it.

How does this work on footage you already shot?

The same as footage you shoot tomorrow, applied one video at a time, after you have decided which videos deserve it.

Autofill on import is a setting for future imports and is off by default; it never reaches back into the library you already have. So cataloguing a backlog is a deliberate act per video: pick one, import it, run your schema against it, and review what came back. There is no library-wide button, and pretending there is would be the wrong thing to promise.

Three things come before the first import. Back the drives up somewhere durable that is not StoryFolder, because losing the only copy while sorting a backlog is a worse outcome than an unlogged shelf. Decide which footage is worth indexing at all, because most of a backlog never needs to be searchable. Then treat the first video as a pilot: two or three fields you would use to find something later, Autofill switched on for the visual ones, one run over every shot in that video, and a look at the result before you commit the rest of the shelf to the same treatment.

Which fields survive missing project context?

The visual ones. Content Type, shot size, camera move, whether B-roll or talent is in frame, a usability rating: a frame supports all of these however old the footage is and however little anyone remembers about the shoot, so they are reasonable Autofill candidates on a backlog exactly as they are on a fresh import.

Client, Job#, the original folder path and release status lived in the paperwork, and a backlog makes them harder to recover. You may genuinely not know the client any more, or the release form may be a sheet of paper in a filing cabinet nobody can find. Type or paste those where you can, and where you cannot, leave the cell blank. A guessed Job# in a Text field looks identical to a wrong one, because a Text field has no domain to check it against.

A small schema pays off more on a backlog than anywhere else. Five fields you will fill on every video beat fifteen you abandon at video three, and a half-applied schema is worse to search than none.

In what order should you work through years of footage?

Start with whatever is most likely to be asked for again. StoryFolder does not measure or enforce any of this; it is a recommendation about where the effort pays back soonest.

1. Footage from a client likely to come back for another job.
2. Footage that could not be reshot if you wanted to.
3. Whatever a current collaborator is asking about this week.
4. The low-value archive, last, if ever.

If the pattern of mistakes on the pilot video is one you are comfortable correcting by hand, keep going one video at a time. If it is not, that is useful to know before you have spent a weekend on it.

When should you choose Kyno, Fast Video Cataloger, or a MAM instead?

When the unit you're organizing is the file itself.

Kyno browses files in place on the drive and hands off to an NLE with metadata attached, which is the right job if what you need is your files organized where they already live. Fast Video Cataloger indexes offline drives on Windows, which matters if "which external is this on" is your actual question. A MAM like iconik or axle.ai adds storage, proxies and permissions behind the catalogue, which is the right layer once several people need shared, managed access. None of the three indexes shots inside a video, and StoryFolder does nothing with storage or drives. Use the one that answers your actual question, and it's fine if that's more than one tool.

FAQ

Is the search fuzzy, like a typo-tolerant search engine? No. Library and board search is plain substring matching. A separate, fuzzy search exists only inside the transcript editor.

Can one search cover both my custom fields and the transcript? Yes, in one pass, across your library — for Text, Number, Dropdown and Tag fields. Rating and Checkbox are reached with a filter chip instead.

Does an active search or filter automatically narrow what I export or publish? No. Only the favourite and hidden flags narrow an export or a publish; a search query on its own doesn't.

Can a client comment on or mark up a published catalogue? No. Published pages are view-only, with no commenting, picking, or marking.

Will AI Autofill run automatically on footage I add later? Only if you turn on Autofill on import, and it's off by default.

Can StoryFolder process my whole backlog in one run? No. A run is scoped to one video. Years of footage means importing and running each video you decide is worth logging, one at a time.

Will a rerun overwrite the values I already corrected on an earlier video? No, as long as Only fill empty fields stays on. It skips any cell that already has something in it.

Does StoryFolder generate proxies for my NLE? No. There's no proxy generation for an NLE and no project round-trip. That's a different job than this one.

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