Recording videos when you travel can be a great way to document your trip, and truly capture the emotion of it. However by the time you’re done you’re likely to end up with lots of video files of the footage that you’ve captured, and the unenviable task of sorting through it all.

If you want to manage and organize your travel video footage more effectively, there are a few steps that you should take:

1) Come up with an organizational structure

The first thing you should do is come up with an organization structure that includes a directory structure and filename convention.

Both should be designed to make it easier for you to find the travel video footage that you need. For example a simple folder structure would be the Trip Name as the parent folder, and specific locations that you visited or days as subfolders.

The most common filename convention is year-month-date, but you can add location or other details to that if you prefer. Try to keep the chronological aspect of it, as it will make sorting it a lot easier in the long run.

2) Start organizing early

It helps if you start to organize your travel video footage early. In particular, you can skim through the video footage that you’ve recorded whenever you have any downtime, and delete any clips that you definitely won’t want to keep.

If your camera allows it, you may want to set it to save videos using the filename convention to save yourself from having to rename files in bulk later.

3) Add tags to video footage

One of the most useful tools available to you to organize your video files are tags. The information that you can add in the form of tags will be far more than any folder or filename structure can provide, making it perfect for travel videos.

That being said adding tags to videos can be time-consuming and you may not want to add tags to all your videos. Instead you can prioritize the videos that you want to tag based on which travel videos you feel require additional information.

4) Convert and backup videos

As a rule it is best to keep your travel videos in the original format and quality they were recorded in. However that isn’t always possible due to storage concerns or if you only need them in a specific format.

For example you may want to convert MOV to AVI to make it easier for further editing. So, you can do it easily with Movavi Video Converter.

In any case you should decide on a format, and also decide how you want to backup any important travel videos. That can be a challenge due to the space that they occupy, but at very least you should try to keep a backup on an external hard drive – just in case.

All said and done the steps above should help you to organize and manage your travel video footage more effectively. In the long run it will make it far easier for you to find the videos that you need quickly, and help ensure that you don’t accidentally ‘lose’ any important videos either.