Hey everyone, I have quite the extensive collection I’ve gained over the last couple years. Looking for ideas on ways to organize it that won’t take a lot of time. Maybe some different categories and what you would recommend?

Probably over 200gb worth of vids

(October 24, 2023, 6:08 pm)Justforfun95 won’t take a lot of time

You're gonna need to be flexible on this part depending on how detailed you want your categories to be. More detail = more time and effort, and it never stops.

Some people like to break their categories up into folders and subfolders, but that makes it hard for something to be a member of multiple categories. Adobe Lightroom (Classic?) has a great tagging system that makes it easy to assign and search by multiple tags, and it works on both photos and videos. Windows File Explorer and macOS Finder both support tags, but those seem like they require more effort.

As mentioned, Windows Explorer does allow you to add tags to files, but you have to go into the file's properties to find and edit them.

A method I've started using is to simply add appropriate tags to the end of a file name. That way, I can see them and search for certain tags fairly easily. My file names all look something like this:

Model Name - Video Title (tag1, tag2, tag3) .mp4

This might get unwieldy if you have a lot of tags, but it works great if you only have a few.

How you go about this will depend heavily on how detailed you want your organization to be, and if you want to retain the original file names or are willing to change them. For large amounts of data I know several people and organizations who simply retain the original name to identify where something came from and track it, whether it’s a personal video collection or a corporate asset.

A basic structure is as simple as a “Pregnancy Fetish” folder with a “Video” and “Photo” sub folder, but I’m guessing you want something more detailed than that. I guess I would ask what’s in your collection? Manyvids/Clips4Sale purchases? Rips from tube sites? Can site stream rips? Instagram pics? Files people have shared on here?

Let’s just use those as an example for now. In that situation I would start with a “Pregnancy Fetish” folder, unless you have other fetishes and other stuff that needs to be organized too, in which case making “Pregnancy” a sub-folder inside of a “Fetish” folder would make more sense. Next I would create a “Videos” folder and a “Photos” folder. In the “Videos” folder I would, at the very least, create a “Paid Content” folder with a “Manyvids” and “Clips4Sale” folder inside of it. Then I would create a “Ripped Content” folder next to the “Paid Content” folder and have a folder for “Tube Rips” and “Cam Rips” inside of it. Then I would create a “Shared Content” folder next to the “Paid Content” folder for stuff people have shared on here. In the “Photos” folder I would create an “Instagram Downloads” folder and store the photos from Instagram there.

Obviously you can be more or less detailed. For example, if you had a huge ManyVids collection, you might want to have sub folders for each model. One guy I know will have a folder for ManyVids, the a “year purchased” folder, then a folder for each model, and then a “year released” folder with that model’s content in it. He does the same thing for Clips4Sale, but with the added caveat that he always renames Clips4Sale videos similar to the way ManyVids names there videos, but even more detailed. (Clips4Sale-Studio_Number-Studio_or_Model_Name-Name_of_Video.fileextension) The reason he does this is that Clips4Sale uses whatever name the file is uploaded with and some people are really sloppy about file names, so this way he knows it’s a Clips4Sale file, knows the studio it came from and the model if he wants to find more of her, and knows what the video was called.

While Windows and macOS both allow you to tag your files, my experience with this in both personal and professional settings is that neither tagging system really works well, although macOS is slightly better once you understand how the tags work. The real problem is that the tags aren’t cross-platform compatible, so if you have one machine running Windows and another running macOS, your metadata tags always disappear or show up incorrectly when you load the file onto the other machine, and if you store the file online somewhere, your metadata often disappears entirely. (Throw in local servers in corporate environments and it becomes a total nightmare.) Adobe Bridge is fantastic at metadata tagging, (as is Lightroom” but if you go to access your Adobe tagged files on a system without Adobe software or copy them out of the light room library, you lose your tagging—especially for videos. (This is because unlike photos, videos have no standard set of metadata tags for organizational purposes that are consistent across all major formats and platforms. For photos EXIF/IPTC metadata is standard and typically carries over. Video has nothing comparable which makes organizing it a much more difficult beast.) My recommendation is that if it’s important, you should try to put it either in the file name or the name of the folder you’re storing the file in. If you’re completely absent-minded and lose things regularly, (and trust me, I know people who fit that description,) put the really important data in both places if you can.